When you come back home after being gone for long, when you look out the the window from the plane and look down at the distant shapes of the paddy fields that grow bigger until you can start making out people and houses, it all starts flooding back.
By the time you're in a van on the way home from the airport, at Negombo street level, the sensory overload just starts overwhelming you- its like revenge for forgetting how things smell, and how personal space is scaled down relative to the country you're in, and how much out of sync you are with your surroundings.
These senses fill your jet-lagged, emotionally overworked brain and starts to fill you with worry: that things have changed and that everyone has left you behind.
And then you come home. Everything starts settling down and the familiar starts rushing back and you're rested enough to know where to file away the different sensations that are vying for your attention.
I go through the pictures I've taken during my time at home and I realize that half of them are wide aperture shots of little details. You always remember the shape of the house, nothing can make you forget that. But you start to forget the layout of the garden, the shape and the feel of the rock and how peaceful things are. I think I took these so I wouldnt forget those things.
