Still Searching For Home

Dewey Decimal 759.13 – American Painting / Artists

I went to New York alone. Not for reinvention—nothing as dramatic as that. I just needed distance, an ocean between me and everything familiar. A solo trip for the sake of breathing space. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in traveling alone, the kind where you dissolve into a city, unremarkable, unnoticed. In New York, I could disappear into crowds, walk for miles without speaking, be still in the middle of all that noise.

I had no particular plans other than to wander the city. I hadn’t planned to go to The Museum of Modern Art. I simply wandered in the way you do when you have nowhere else to be. I wandered through the galleries without much intention. Past the bold, screaming colours of Warhol’s Marilyn, past the sharp angles of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, past Pollock’s frantic splatters. I stopped here and there, tilting my head like I was trying to understand something that just wasn’t speaking to me.

I liked some of it. Some of it I admired without loving. Some of it just washed over me, leaving no trace. I was tired, I had wandered almost the entire gallery , my feet throbbed, I thought about leaving and getting a coffee and finally sitting down.

And then I turned a corner, and there she was.

At first, I only saw the colour—the muted gold of the field, the faded pink of her dress. A soft, quiet palette among so much loudness. And then, the pull. That unmistakable feeling of something in me recognises something in this.

Leaning in, I read the name of the painting - Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth.

Standing back again I see Christina, hair pulled back, sitting in a field, gazing toward the house in the distance. And something in the way she looked at it—yearning, waiting, exhausted—hit me square in the chest.

I thought she was resting. Or waiting for someone. Or maybe she had finally made it home, collapsed in the grass, overwhelmed by the sheer effort of it. I felt the lump rise in my throat before I even knew why. It was like an open-palm smack to the chest, like CPR.

The painting wasn’t even given its own wall—it was just there, one among many, not set apart like something you were meant to have a moment with. People strolled past, pausing briefly before moving on. Some took a quick photo, already turning away as they snapped it. I barely noticed them. I barely noticed anything except her.

People cut across my line of sight, but I didn’t move. I shifted slightly when someone stepped in front of me, then found my way back, gaze locked, trying to understand why it had taken hold of me so completely. I think I was waiting for it to let me go.

It didn’t.

Eventually, I left the gallery, but not before buying a postcard of the painting in the gift shop. A small, glossy version I could hold in my hands. Later, sitting on a bench in Central Park, staring at that tiny version of her, I caved and Googled it. And that’s when I learned she wasn’t resting at all. She was crawling. She was unable to walk.

I hadn’t seen that at first. It winded me. I looked at the postcard again—really looked. And suddenly, it wasn’t just longing anymore. It was something heavier. A sadness, a being left behind. The distance to the house now felt impossible. No one was coming for her.

It hit differently, knowing that. It hit differently, standing there in my 40s.

If I’d seen the painting when I was younger, I might have thought it was romantic—something wistful, poetic. But now? Now it felt like looking in a mirror. Because isn’t that what I’d been doing? Crawling toward something I still hadn’t reached. Searching for home, for a place where I could finally say: This is it. This is where I belong.

I thought I’d have found it by now. Not just a house, but a life that felt like mine, a love that stayed, a certainty that didn’t slip through my fingers. But instead, I keep stretching toward it, dragging myself through every version of the future I thought I’d have.

Art has a way of finding us when we aren’t looking, pressing into the softest parts of us. I stood in front of Christina’s World and saw myself. Saw every time I thought I’d arrived, only to find I still had so far to go.

And yet—she keeps moving. That’s what stays with me. No matter how far the house is, she keeps going. Maybe that’s all any of us can do. Keep crawling forward, even when we’re not sure we’ll ever get there.

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Hope - That I keep finding pieces of myself in front of paintings that make me see the world differently. The art that hits me in the chest.

Quote: “Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.” — Andrew Wyeth

Song: Motion Sickness – Phoebe Bridgers

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