A Place Where Home Lives On is a continuation of Stories of Faces and Distant Places, a previous project in which I spoke with people about their experiences of migration, distance, and belonging. If that project was about listening to their stories, this one became a way of sitting with what those stories left behind.
After the conversations ended, I found myself returning to certain words, memories, and questions. In their experiences, I recognized parts of my own. What began as an attempt to understand how other people made sense of leaving home gradually became a reflection on my own relationship with migration, belonging, and the person I was becoming.
This piece is my attempt to gather those thoughts. Maybe not to arrive at a single answer, but perhaps to make some sense of the space between where we come from and where we find ourselves now. I believe that is what the conversations were leading me toward all along: the understanding that home does not disappear simply because we leave it. It changes shape. It follows us into unfamiliar places. It lives in memory, in the people we meet, and sometimes in the stories that allow us to recognize ourselves.
Music: Homeward by Noru (HarumachiMusic) via Pixabay