When I was leaving Kiev in August of 2005, I told my family and my friends that I had no idea when I was coming back. I said it flippantly, because I was tired of my parents’ bickering.
A month after I left, my cousin, Yaroslava, died in a terrible car accident. I’ve wanted to come home ever since, and I couldn’t. Money was always in the way. Money, perhaps, or something else, something greater. The idea that someone up there was tugging on the strings in such a way as to make me realize just home much I need that place, it’s cracked sidewalks, the stone courtyards filled with echoes, beer tinged with honey, happiness tinged with regret. The pear-trees in the yard, the desperately long lines at government offices and foreign embassies, the crosses leaning sideways on abandoned graves, all of that is a life-line, a slightly poisoned umbilical chord between myself and the greater world.
I’m very tired of being poor, mostly because I just want to go home for a bit.
Natalia A. 