My audio guide is sharing thoughts recorded outside the school my mother went to as a teenager. I stand and look into the empty room. As dried, brown leaves rustle in the wind in the empty backyard, forming a circle, I still stand and think of you. Of us, and what got lost in translation, in (not) talking. And what got found in constructing your memory, trespassing it.

3.51 minutes

Photos credit: Vladimir Lemaire

My location’s history has its origins far back in time. Its origins survived world wars and saw the world changing over time. The era following World War II, the post-war era giving birth to traumatic inscription into the DNA. Parts of my location are made of blood and flesh, of ever-changing cells. And all these were made of someone else’s blood and flesh and ever-changing and melting cells. When I think of my mom’s memory, I think of my grandmother. Her past and her memory, which I don’t know much about, and today can only ask my own past and memory. My location was born in the nine months preceding the 16th of April 1963. But then again, it was also born and carried in the years before, in a young body, a pregnant body, a hurt body, an aging body. It grew and changed and eventually became someone, a self, a you, a her, a me. It passed some things on, kept some things to itself, deleted some things on the way into the present. In its own coming of age, maybe, as I presume, my location chose as its task of the heart, to protect the self it lives in. Its body and its feelings. Can your memory be lonely.