Traveling

I'm making plans to go to New York. Somehow the idea of escaping one unfamiliar city for another is inviting. The world is different here in the directions of street signs and unusable bus transfers; I find myself a foreigner in a strange land albeit still the land of America. I'm drawn to New York. How odd that that is the place I choose when I'm home sick. Simon Critchley once told me that New York didn't belong to anyone. That was one of the things that is so intriguing about it. I believe he is right. Perhaps that is why I can feel somewhat at home there. In a city of 8 million, where on a short subway ride one will hear at least half a dozen languages, there is a place where everyone can be at home and not at home simultaneously.

I thought as time went on I would grow used to this place. But I find my self instead looking for a place in time when I can return home. Only the home I know doesn't exist for me. I still think it does at times. At times, I forget. Looking out a bus window, I believe I'm at home. Not that I wish or remember that I'm somewhere else, but that I really am there. Then I remember. Remember where I am. I was in a pub on Friday night and overheard some men talking about how New England was perfect, how they were pleased to lead that life of a fisherman. Perhaps we always feel most at home where we originated from. Our beginnings are the root of where we find perfection, only we forget this as we grow older and think we must find this in other things, and so setting out in the world, we lose our home altogether.

Home I am beginning to think is not a place, but a state of mind. It is nothing that I have at the moment. Perhaps when I am in my apartment quietly reading alone, I can feel at home, but most of the time I feel like an outsider. There are moments I remember back in Portland with friends at Roadside Attraction on a winter evening talking in a corner booth about everything and nothing. Those are moments that feel like home. But they have vanished into time and space that is bridged only by memory. How do I regain this? Perhaps the answer is something like in Proust to write more and all the time until the writing of memory becomes greater than the space of time.