I lay awake. Again. Something inside needs to be fed. Something inside is being overlooked while all the wrong parts are being over-analyzed. It’s times like these that I find myself maneuvering my furniture around the room into the dark hours of the night- stacking, folding, rearranging, and hoping to come across a perfect sequence of furniture and picture frames that allow me to feel new again.

San Francisco, 2008

I’ve spent much time directing my thoughts toward travel: Work hard, save money, plan, dream, repeat. In the past year I’ve had brief stints in Barcelona, Saigon, and Bangkok- each one of these places carrying it’s own pace and it’s own way of living. But at the end of the day, after my brief meetings with new people and this new collective way of seeing from an entire people, I cannot help but wonder if I’m merely rearranging myself around the world, only to find that in essence I am still the same person.

In a recent article, printed in APERTURE magazine, the editor posts a quote from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience…they were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time.”

Hanoi, Vietnam 2009

If my memory could be mapped out, and placed side by side with a map of the places I have been, one would quickly learn that it coincides with my impression of a place. These places are always changing and shifting and filling themselves with like-minded people that draw me near or deflect my being.

Coming across an original Banksy in Paris 2004

As if throbbing and pulsating, the living, breathing cities of London and Paris are calling me back and lately I cannot ignore the deep yearning for past places and a renewed self. The air has grown stale where I currently reside and I am only met with a confused version of my San Francisco self. As the mundane acts of the American life creep into my daily grind, I admit that I am running, sprinting from this obligatory and complicated way of living. I can only hope that by reaching out to these cities that they too might reach me half way and shake me up.

If my memory could be mapped out like the places I have been, with a thin string connecting each moment to each moment, I hope that I can understand where it’s going, because right now I’m dangling from that thin string and the map looks unrecognizable.

Borne District, Barcelona, Spain, 2009