be(long)ing

What does it mean to belong? Objects belong to people. People belong to people. People and identities belong to one another. I have always been interested in the relation between people and the things they owned. But this became complicated when I started thinking about ownership in relation to memory, history and human mortality. The question is simple: Who and what are we for? The answer takes longer consideration. Robert Olen Butler wrote that all good stories have characters who yearn. I think that this yearning is the same thing as longing, and I think that what we are yearning and longing for is the feeling of belonging, because to belong is to exist among others and to own things is to exist in the world.