Memory Pictures #8
Many questions arise when you think about memory, names, the absence of names, questions that essentially rest on senses and spontaneity, which determine our relation to love, hate, intimacy, abandonment, hunger, fear, memory.
I have come across book titles from which your soul was missing, Salma!
As the One Keeping the Sand, Writing for the Truth, Alzheimer, and The Olive Trees in the Streets. I felt conscience pangs and returned to the book The Light Fighter.
I swear, Salma, I have read the foreword more than 10 times. Each day, the child returned to the same beach. In every reading.
I wavered between demonstrations and the calm and the self-portraits and the naivete, to some extent. I searched in people's faces for the traitress, even though this label exasperated me. I repeat in in my heart: traitor, not traitress.
Six months later
In the streets of the great big underground world, where there is no reception, I find myself dealing with questions irrelevant to the truth.
How does gray turn to green?
The way I can see that gray is my favorite color, while it is the one I hate the most.
I wanted to escape, but the screams of a nameless girl stopped me. I lifted my head to heaven and said, how could a father not name his daughter?
Salma, in my cell phone's memory I keep a recently published book titled Hunger, by the writer Roxanne Gay. I read it whenever I am really hungry.
This hunger is almost completely different from its usual names. We starve when being abandoned, and we starve when we are afraid, or when we encounter a certain memory.
I avoid thinking about these complex issues. I wonder about springtime, as if I'm noticing I for the first time, and almost believe that we require nothing but flowers.
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