Those distant feelings still felt so close.
Yet I didn’t know how to respond to that.
Growing up, the people and places around me were constantly changing, sometimes disappearing from my life altogether.
Family members, homes, schools… Nothing seemed to stay the same for long.
These experiences made it difficult for me to believe that I could ever form a lasting connection with a place or a person.
So I began collecting small objects that held a certain feeling for me, hoping to preserve what a particular scene, place, moment, or person had once made me feel.
A watch with a broken strap, a few photographs, some letters, a stone from the seaside, and many other ordinary things.
They travelled with me from place to place.
New objects were added, while others were taken out, held, and looked at again and again.
Some were eventually let go of, however reluctantly.
Those that remained seemed to carry the feelings I was most drawn to.
I kept choosing to hold on to them, perhaps hoping that those feelings might somehow return.
What I longed to preserve was never just the objects themselves, but the moments in which they had existed, and the feelings that seemed to be sealed within them, repeatedly reaffirmed and deepened over time.
In 2023, I returned home from the UK and opened the box once again, attempting to photograph the objects inside, one by one.
