Moscow feels different now. Walking streets that used to be automatic, noticing things that were invisible before I left.
Four years abroad changes your relationship with home. The city looks the same but I’m seeing it through foreign eyes. Architectural details I never registered, social dynamics I took for granted, the particular quality of summer light on concrete that feels distinctly Russian.
Strange realisation: my books are probably better known internationally than here. Built my readership in English first, crafted my voice for audiences who don’t share my cultural shorthand. Now I’m the expat writer visiting her own birthplace.
Been thinking about memory and identity whilst wandering familiar neighbourhoods. How much of who I am comes from this place versus who I’ve chosen to become elsewhere? My novels obsess over manufactured memories, but what about organic ones that fade through distance?
The language feels rusty in my mouth. Not the words themselves – those never leave you. But the rhythm, the cultural references, the unspoken assumptions that lubricate conversation. I catch myself thinking in English before translating back.
Moscow readers would understand my work differently than Brighton audiences. They’ve lived through societal amnesia, state-sponsored forgetting, collective rewriting of history. My interactive fiction about memory manipulation isn’t abstract here – it’s lived experience.
Maybe that’s why I write so much about being between worlds. When home becomes a choice rather than a given, you pay attention to what stays and what slips away.
The roots are still here. Just transplanted into different soil now.
Daria Ryzhikova Writer