Thinking of Home

I went for a long walk yesterday. I wandered through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I tried to imagine the people who had grown up there and what it was like for them. I thought about how far away the houses I grew up in are and couldn’t connect the two feelings in my head. I don’t know what the word is to describe this is, but it always makes me feel a little sick. It’s almost worse when the concrete, the walls, the flowers in the area remind me of my place of home. Sometimes I see ivy and it reminds me of my grandparents. Then I think about how they don’t live there anymore and how I will probably never be in that house again – and if I was, it wouldn’t be the house I knew. I ended up in the park and lay down on the grass. I listened to the sound of the river flowing and heard the flapping of wings as the birds flew and nested overhead. I opened my eyes and when looking up to the pale grey, cloudy sky, I saw hundreds of bugs, circling around one another above my head. I felt like I was hallucinating as the amount of creatures doubled and tripled, they looked like stars and I felt as if I was floating. A blackbird swooped low right through my line of vision and it shocked me back to reality.

A sense of displacement is something I constantly feel and think about a lot in my work and photography. How do you get home if you don’t know what it is and are essentially uncomfortable with what it was? How do you erase the sense of unease and danger? How do you relax and settle? Maybe you can’t.