New Year 2004

Happy New Year.

I begin this archive of greetings with a year I entered late. In January 2004 I was still in Istanbul, finishing school, and Ukraine was a name on a university list rather than a place I could picture. By the autumn I was in Kyiv, and it has been the centre of my life ever since.

So this greeting is written backwards, with affection and a certain amount of astonishment at how little I knew. To everyone who was here that January, keeping the year going while I was still deciding: thank you. I arrived to a country that people had already built.

May the year ahead be kind to your household.