With the arrival of each new year, we are compelled to reflect in dreadful wonder on the distance we have journeyed through time. It is strange that our lives, up to the present moment, are part of history, and that we keep moving forward into it. There is something important to be understood, it seems, by unearthing our own near past and feeling almost alienated from it: Was I really that person, ignorant of all that would happen between then and now? In another city, in love with someone else?