Where are you local?

Immigration returned me to a state of childhood — everything unfamiliar, the same helplessness, except now you are your own parent. I began rebuilding from fragments of old desires. First, scents came back: freshly cut grass, a pond with water lilies, a forest after rain. Memories I hadn't touched in decades, arriving unbidden in a city that was not mine. They felt like directions — back toward something true. For years, I had shaped myself around others' projects, deadlines, and definitions of what mattered. Here, stripped of all that, I had to ask a different question: what had I actually wanted, before I learned to want the right things? The answer, when it came, was embarrassingly simple. A dog. A childhood dream I had never allowed myself. I couldn't have one — but I could be near one. I started pet-sitting.

Living temporarily in other people’s homes, I found myself inhabiting spaces that were not mine, yet deeply personal to others. I slept in their rooms, moved through their routines, and inherited their spaces. In former nurseries, I imagined other childhoods. In homes where couples were quietly building a future together — moving in, marrying, preparing for a child — I asked myself what it might feel like to have certainty, and make choices that last beyond the present moment.

This is a project about displacement, the strange freedom of trying on lives that are not yours, and the question that follows: who might I have been, had I been placed differently? I would not have been able to ask that question had I stayed where I began.

Evgeniya Strygina took part in Photo Meet with our Assistant Editor Carolina Semprucci.