Transient
I used to think “home” was a destination, an address I could arrive at and finally exhale into. Over the years, I’ve lived inside a string of temporary rooms and borrowed corners: a bed that never quite learns the shape of my sleep, a window that frames a view I will soon stop calling mine. Each move carries the same refrain, offered kindly and often: home is where your heart is; home is the people you love; home is the food that tastes like a memory. These are the templates we inherit, soft assurances meant to stitch us into belonging.
But I’ve learned that places can be strict teachers. Some rooms ask you to be quieter than you are. Some streets expect you to fall in step, to read the unspoken rules, to blend until your edges don’t show. And in those places, where belonging is promised as a reward for compliance, comfort goes missing. I find myself present but not held, like a coat hung on a nail: useful, tidy, easy to forget.
This work is a self-portrait made out of departure. It follows the geography of my leaving, empty roads that stretch like unanswered questions, silent nights that don’t echo back, dreams tinted by the light of unfamiliar ceilings. I don’t hold on for long. Every time I believe I’ve found something solid, I pack it into a story and carry it away.
What I’m left with is a collection of unfinished memories: fragments that refuse to become a whole. Not a life neatly summarised, but scattered pieces, postcards without dates, keys to doors I no longer open, a sigh caught in the thin wisp of breath that fogs a cold morning. I depart and I collect. I look away and I find something new, and I hear myself say the same hopeful sentence, almost rehearsed: This place is really nice. The people are friendly and helpful. I should have no difficulty living here.
The photographs ask a quieter question beneath that optimism: if ease is not belonging, then what is? And when you’ve moved so often that “home” becomes a verb – arrive, arrange, leave – how do you learn to stay, not just in a place, but inside yourself?