Homesick

Carrie Schneider
Fallen Women (From Here) / c-print / 58 x 87 inches

Today I spent a short time staring into the sky thinking about the ocean...I thought of how nice it would be to sit at the shore and smell the salty air as it filled my lungs. Feeling the sand squish between my toes...and diving into the water letting it surround my body as I'm submerged...the sound of the world becomes muffled, distant, still. I miss being able to walk to the shore line and being enveloped by the sea...today I felt a kind of homesickness.


I don't know what that means anymore...to be homesick, because to be sick for a home you have to have one first. I miss places I've lived and the people located at those places...but I think more of home as the people not the place. A place can have sentimental aspect and give nostalgic stimulus to memories...but its not the place that remembers... its us. Or does it? Can not a place bare scares of its past, like the bulbous cancer like forms on a tree that grow over places it has been cut...a kind of remembering of its pains but growing past them.
For a while now I have been plagued with the question...what is home? The more I think about it I realize that part of my answer is in what it is not. Home for me is not in a place or in a building. Although a house is a beautiful structure that contains history and memory of those whom have dwell within its walls...it can also be a confining structure with limitations. Is home with those we love? Sometimes I feel like this is true...that with family and loved ones this is where I feel most at home...but this lacks also.
I have to backtrack to the statement of place...there is something about place. There are places I've been at for years...leave and return and I feel only the distance...but there are places I have never been and I feel a sense of "home."
I think there is something in these "sense of home" that makes me want to understand what is this "sensing?" Usually when I am outside and still, quiet, listening, and looking I can feel it...like coding in a system.



derelict |ˈderəˌlikt|
adjective
in a very poor condition as a result of disuse and neglect : the cities were derelict and dying.
• (of a person) shamefully negligent in not having done what one should have done : he was derelict in his duty to his country.
noun
a person without a home, job, or property : derelicts who could fit all their possessions in a paper bag.
• a piece of property, esp. a ship, abandoned by the owner and in poor condition.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin derelictus ‘abandoned,’ past participle of derelinquere, from de- ‘completely’ + relinquere ‘forsake.’