breathing air forgotten since

Sometimes I just lose touch, forget to update, forget to keep track in the virtual place that I will look back on later. And I also forget to be present in moments, get caught up in tasks, in normal days that will fade and become gilded with gold when I look back at the memories.

But here are some tangible memories from last year, when we spent months on end living in Notting Hill, feeling the ache of cold floors in our bones, getting to know the people of Portobello Road and naming them as our friends.

you know when you come home

I visited my parents for an extended period last summer, and when I returned to my home and community life, I felt the oddest whispers of nostalgia as we were doing things that I thought I would remember forever.

But I developed this roll of film yesterday and found the photographs that I took over the past year, and I realised I'd forgotten so many of these moments.

I must be living a life where timeless has a new meaning, where moments that define home and hope and safety are becoming commonplace for me. There are still things I yearn for, and it is good to have dreams, but there is also such peace in knowing that there is home.

(never) turning back

I had heard of Argentina for years, of its tumultuous history, its passionate people, how the helado is the best but its government is the worst, until the words in my head were a tangle of English and Spanish and I had a ticket booked and a schedule that took me from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata (a tourist city by the sea) with my arts ministry. My heart was opened and my mind was baffled by the sharp dividing line between poverty and wealth, between being loved and being left, and I grappled to fathom a culture so different from my own.

Ciao means hello and goodbye

In Italy, you never know if people are coming or leaving, if moments are beginning or ending, and history and recession and winding roads from the hills to the sea all run together, but there's a consolation - there will always be pasta on the table.

the voices in the morning

There are voices I love to hear in the morning, and fall asleep to as they murmur along with the constant London rain, my family across the ocean. There aren't words to describe the way these fingers and toes and livers and spleens have wriggled their way into my heart.

my hidden quiet

I have lived in this house for over a year now, longer than any house since I "came of age," and the corners of it have become so much a home that I cannot even fathom returning to the country of my birth and having to let go of my favourite place to rest my bones.

the pristine quiet

it was almost a cliche, plumbing the depths of my past in an all white house, with space and quiet and tears, and the sharp tongue of anger that I had hidden from for so long, but there was a freedom, too, in the quiet of the summer, in the hush of freedom.