I really don't feel well today

It's not that I am sick. I'm pretty much over the cold that knocked me out last week, and physically I feel pretty good. I don't feel well because of a dream.

The dream was a mishmash of every move in my life that I didn't want to make. For the most part it was the house I grew up in, which we moved out of in a day (packing and everything) when I was ten when my mother left my father. But in the dream I was moving out from North Van again. Ivana was there and had several people over. They were sitting on the porch drinking chai and I had to walk right through them to move my things. Things I had left on the porch to move had been haphazardly pushed off the end of the porch to make room for her guests. But the dream was not confined to this. What had been my room in reality was, in the dream, a different room. It was my room from the apartment I lived in the first time I went through an apartment fire. At times the house also became the house in Kits I lived in with my wife that I got evicted from because the landlord wanted to live in my apartment. This happened right after she came out and moved out.

I was supposed to help Tanya move today. I got up on time to do so. Printed out a map to her old place and everything, but when it came to it I couldn't do it. After the dream, after moving all my friends out of this building because of the fire, I just couldn't do. I couldn't stand the thought of moving again, even if it was someone else. And maybe a little bit because it is Tanya. She would have been moving in with Natalie downstairs, which as I will explain later, was part of something I was really looking forward to. It makes me sad that it isn't happening.

It's hard to explain what home means to me, what it has to be for me. There's only been a handful of places that I've really considered home. There was the house I lived in from age three to ten. That's the house that almost always shows up when I dream about "home". That's "the house I grew up in". I was at home in the cheap, crappy bachelor suite I had in Victoria in View Towers. I had lots of friends in the building and in the neighbourhood and we'd wander between the apartments in sock feet, get together for movies on a whim, share what little food we had -- In our just-out-of-highschool poverty we had a community. The apartment I had my second year of Malaspina was a home as well. I had my pet rats in the bathroom. There were other people in the complex that were also going to Malaspina, mostly in the music programme. On a whim I would tie my surfboard to the car and go play in the ocean. My mailbox was always full of letters from my pen-pals. I spent all my time in that place drawing, painting, writing and surrounded by music (real music, not someone's thumping stereo). I left that place to finish my degree in Toronto and ended up instead in the next place that was home. An the apartment I had in the basement of an old house in Kits. Brenda and I were roomies there at first, she having just extracted herself from a bad relationship and I having just found myself stranded in Vancouver. I chose not to go to Toronto when the option came up again and I hung on to the apartment when Brenda got her own place. Over time my entire marriage would play out there. I lived there for six years and a month. I was at home for a little while in the studio I had in Gastown, when the building was new and everyone had an excited energy that something wonderful could happen. We created a gallery on the corner, we had roof-top parties - sometimes without planning to. All until the real artist were replaced with film-production-yuppies and drug-dealing ravers and eventually the ravers next door ruined it with their endless noise. I still miss the trains. The place on 6^th that Nick and Sandi started out as a mere replacement for the studio in Gastown, but became a home. I had wanted to move into that building when I lost my home in Kits, but couldn't afford it at the time.

As an adult there is common indicator of when I feel at home somewhere. I produce images. The apartment in Nanaimo, during my second year at Malaspina is where I really started producing mature work. Natalie's favourite piece was made there. In the place in Kits I finished my degree and defined the theories that underlie what I produce. For a long time after that place I was never quite at home and I produced very little work. Come Railtown Studios in Gastown and my production picked up again. I created my own favourite piece which I have hung in my office (which, interestingly, is of the view from my grotty little View Towers apartment in Victoria that I loved) and started painting portraits again, eventually starting the portrait series that continued while I was in the place on 6^th. And in the place on 6^th started the line drawing portraits like the one I just did for Elaine (OK, I actually did the first one at Railtown, but it became a series at 6^th).

The first little while here I really felt like I was going to have that amazing sense of creative community that existed that second year in Nanaimo and the first little while at Railtown. The fire took that away. And because of the fire I'm still not settled in properly. Because of it I've moved too many things. And I worry. I may have lost part of what I felt here, but it is still home and when I am at work and hear sirens I always watch out the window to be sure they aren't coming here again. It isn't about the stuff. And it was the same when there was a fire in Railtown. It's about having my place, my Sanctuary, the place I am proud is mine (even if I am only renting it), it's about my home. Having that means more to me than anything.

I just want to be home today.