The Flux Capacitor

The shortest distance between my new home and my old apartment in Dhaka is 12,272 kilometers. Or expressed in miles its 7625. Or by boat it's 6626 nautical miles. You choose. Either way it's far by any means of expressing distance. I could go into the emotional distance of it all but that's just not my thing.

This morning I dropped five dollars into a coin machine at my local laundry-mat. As the coins dropped down like some low budget slot machine it hit me just how far I am from Dhaka. This feeling has come over me before but for some reason it wasn't until today till I wanted to know just how far I was. My brain could connect the dots better than my eyes could so seeing it on the computer, in actual quantifiable numbers, helped pound in the last nail that I am actually back in my home country.

I left Dhaka on January 31st. It was a Saturday. With the plane racing the sun to see which one of us would hit the mark of the east coast first my mind went to autopilot as what I was experiencing felt like a dream. I still don't know why I left other than to follow a dream. I gave up one to follow another. Doing so was in the simplest terms an act of faith - the space between reaching for one wrung on the monkey bars and the other felt infinite.

But I am here now. I am home. I am taking the time to learn the craft of documentary photography to return to Bangladesh (possibly) and others like it. With this new skill set in hand I aim to photograph images of suffering, hope, destruction, and great achievement. In the act of taking a photo comes with it the possibility to change the way we all think about the world around us. In so doing we can all connect the dots between ourselves and those right next door or dozens of time zones ahead.

Time travel is quite a trip.