We Were Here

Yesterday 13 of the 16 people who graduated from my year all came back to Leeds for a lovely reunion. It got me thinking a lot about this project. When they left, certain places took on a different significance. Walking away from saying goodbye to Holly and Ruth I thought about this quote from De Certeau:

“Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name. If “an event is what one recounts”, the city only has a story, only lives by preserving its memories.”

The city changed. Certain things stood out. Certain street corners were invested with a newly-charged significance. What is home in this respect? Home is not a place, it's a collection of constantly shifting experiences, ghosts, stories. A city then is a collection of these stories. It's a place written and re-written, it exists in multiplicity.

Here's something I wrote a while ago...

We Were Here
What am I scared of forgetting?
That we were here.

Simply here, sharing space.
Crossing sightlines:
I was with you, here.

And we'll always be here.
folded and unfolded, photos like tawdry maps.
Echoes that cause walls to stir,
whispering we were here, here we were.