Documenting my return to my hometown: a journal entry & practical experimentation
This summer, my holiday ended with a last minute trip to my hometown in Toronto, Canada. It was a very last minute thing --- my parents arranged for my return flight to be moved so that I could join them in the last week of my trip before coming back to start my third and final year of university. It was the first time I'd gone back in years and although I swore I never wanted to go back, something had been pulling me to return for some time now. Like I had to see it for myself to know for sure.
On our way to Toronto from Hawaii, we had a layover in Vancouver so we could visit my older brother, Milton, and my grandpa who is now living in a long term care home with dementia. I'd known my grandpa was getting older and subsequently smaller and more frail while I'd been gone but I think a part of me didn't want to face it. But I walked through the door of his room and saw him lying in bed and it all hit me at once.
He wouldn't stop insisting he must be dreaming. "It's been so long," he said. About 7 years.
I watched my dad try to hide his tears on the plane and in the car. I visited my mom's dad's gravestone that hadn't even been engraved yet since it'd only been around 3 months since his passing. My mom talks to his picture on her phone lock screen sometimes. My aunt has two dogs now and all the little kids I grew up with are older than I was when I left. All the teachers I had in elementary school have left and my hometown is so much quieter than I remember. The city is smaller now that I'm not and all I can do about it is make art.
I used to want to write a book. Something almost autobiographical and poetic. But all I could muster was 2-5 minute songs. I don't think I fully realised I was already writing my autobiography through my music. If I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd remember as much as I do now.
But even then, it's in fragments. Something about this year and the summer just past has really made me confront my mortality. Even as I reached legal adulthood, I still didn't feel grown up. But now, I'm watching myself and everyone around me grow up and it's throwing me into a whole new identity crisis. It feels like up until now I'd been trying to piece together puzzle pieces from separate boxes or one that was given to me disassembled without a picture on the box to tell me what it was meant to look like complete. I'd been half expecting some epiphany that would reveal the bigger picture and the hidden truth to me all at once if I just kept going back to where I was last every time I moved somewhere different. But it didn't happen. The past I was both running away from and looking for feels as familiar to me as a hazy recurring dream.
I want to make this dream world as tangible as I can so I have something to show for it all.
"I'm all grown up but I'm still just a kid" are you sure you're awake, filling in the spaces (2021)
filling in the spaces: A Virtual World
Significant places in my memory:
The little white room
My back garden (Hawaii Kai)
The jungle gym (Richmond Hill)
Sleepless mornings alleyway
STSTS rooftop
Filling in the spaces train
My bedroom in Toronto (Richmond Hill)
Charlie’s bedroom / garden (London)
Hampstead Heath / tree (London)
Eve’s car ? (AYSYA)
My old kitchen / the easter hunt video (Richmond Hill)
Alice and Grant’s old apartment (Vancouver)
Concept: A video game world representing my personal struggles with memory disruption as a result of emotional distress and trauma, as well as experiences of derealisation and dissociation causing a disconnect from sense of identity and external reality.
Gameplay:
The map will be an amalgamation of places I’ve lived and been – the parts I remember of them blending together into one world.
Each location will have its own short puzzles and mini game challenges that must be completed to progress with the “story.” Completion will allow the player to collect an item revealing a “piece” of the story e.g. diary pages, VHS tapes, photographs in an album, etc.
Levels named after song titles? E.g. chapter 1: runaway
Grassy - charlie’s garden, my back garden, playground jungle gym
City - alleyway, rooftop, train, apartment
House - my bedroom, charlie’s bedroom, old kitchen
"I lost the diaries that I used to keep to lock up my childhood crush / I don't remember much if I'm honest" runaway, reality is a fever dream, baby (2020)
'filling in the spaces' was the first EP I wrote and released with my younger brother, Liam. Many of the songs were ones we worked on during the 2020 lockdown when being stuck in quarantine caused my mental state to occupy imagined spaces and unreal worlds. I thought the title could be suitable for our project since the concept for the narrative is like a journey of "filling in the spaces" of memory and meaning for the player/protagonist (versions of myself).
The EP's third track, 'sleepless mornings' was the single that started the project, as part of a music production masterclass my brother was taking. The album cover art, commissioned by our friend, Crystal Legaspino, was a representation of some of these imagined places as informed by some of Liam's own dreams.
Many of the visual inspirations for the covers were largely influenced by Japanese anime, neon cities, city pop, lo-fi, etc.
A consistent feature of the cover art was the illustrated versions of ourselves in these spaces to add a personal touch to it. Crystal was able to implement our likeness into the drawings using reference photos we took of ourselves posing in real life.
Similarly, I think creating a video game avatar of myself to put in the virtual world would be a step-up from this idea. It would enable me to explore the sum of my creative visions over the years and hopefully express something possibly profound about the nature of memory, growing up, and the human experience, through an auto-fiction approach -- combining fictive elements with autobiography (as Peter Dukes suggested it seemed the case).
Making Work About My Childhood Homes
When I was back in Richmond Hill, my family visited all of our old houses. I've lived in many places since moving away from my childhood homes so it was a strange experience noticing how unfamiliar the neighbourhoods felt to me in person when they can be so viscerally melancholic and whole in my memory.
Last week, I was stuck on how to visualise the layout of my house for Joud to make into a 3D model. After attempting sketches of the interior from memory, I decided to experiment with photos of the outside instead.
I had taken a couple photos of two of my old houses while my family did a drive by tour of our old neighbourhood but they weren't clear enough to work with. So I searched the addresses on Google Earth and took screenshots before putting them into Photoshop.
I wanted to try to combine parts of each house in a sort of collage by cutting and pasting them onto one photo. However, I thought there was something poignant about just the transparent space left behind after cutting out the houses.
After selecting windows, doors, balconies, etc. and arranging them into one house, I added a photo I took of a sunset in Hawaii as the background for the sky.
It felt like something was missing so I decided to export it to my iPad so I could write or draw over it -- adding to the collage aesthetic. I chose a few lines from a note I'd been keeping over the summer where I wrote possible lyrics or poetry lines about growing up (something about living alone for the first half of the summer really made me confront my own mortality).
Since I used these lines, I really wanted to actually use them in a song. So for the past couple of days I've been experimenting with AI generated chord progressions on an app called Demo and writing and rewriting lyrics to a song I've been meaning to write for awhile. I chose the song title after the street I lived on for most of my childhood. Working from the document, these are the final lyrics as of last night:
carnoustie crescent
Cmaj7 C6 Am7 F6 Fmaj7
Cmaj7 C6 Am7 F6 Fmaj7 C/G F6
i know these trees i know this drive
it’s the same route home after all this time
and i know i grew up under this very same sky but i lied
there’s not a stone in this road i recognize
paper bag with a hole inside
all my things on the pavement in a line
found myself back in my hometown for the first time in awhile so we drive
and at the end of the road i realize
C G Am7 Fmaj7
long time coming but i’m finally feeling older
walking back home and nights are getting colder
worried i’ll wake up when it’s already over
where did the time go?
grieving for deaths that haven’t even happened
watching my dad seeing his own again
what do you know? i’m becoming just like him
where did the time go?
Am7 Fmaj7 F6 G7 G
when did i live all these lives?
if i was her then who am i?
what is there that i still need to find?
Cmaj7 C6 Am7 F6 Fmaj7
Cmaj7 C6 Am7 F6 Fmaj7 C/G F6
run around in a school playground
no familiar faces left to see me bigger now
and nobody ever tells you what you should’ve noted down, should’ve kept
and what to do with all the rest
C G Am7 Fmaj7
middle school’s a battlefield i’m hardly a soldier
it’s my own world resting all on my shoulders
would she be great if only someone had told her
don’t let the time go
Am7 Fmaj7 F6 G7 G
when did i live all these lives?
if i was her then who am i?
what is there that i still need to find?
C G Am7 Fmaj7
and i’m standing in the garage feeling like i got robbed
cause i can’t find it on carnoustie crescent
and my mom cries now her dad is gone and her first son won’t call
while i’m here in the kitchen making breakfast
Am7 Fmaj7 F6 G7 G
and i don’t know if i left
but i can’t let go just yet
C G Am7 Fmaj7
summer at my parents’ house
learning how to be well
my little cousin catching tadpoles in a seashell
maybe i’ll learn how to be myself
and finally let go
I also made a very very rough very low quality recording of the song to document the melody in full: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ay8FhnvrZNdSWykaP25rFQRqQqUlN_BO/view?usp=sharing
I think the song might be nice to have as part of the games credits or as the final song you collect when you finish the last level or challenge of the game. I'd like to also try making a music video made with archival footage from my family's home videos.
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