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Just like exhibitors property, Inspired by the artist Ana Lucía Galicia, my memory is also mediated and filled by objects. I think everyone, as Proust described In search of lost time, They experience memory epiphanies: remembering forgotten memories through the contact of our senses with something. Books, for example, can transport us to places we have read and evoke memories of people who recommended them to us. That is why, when I am distracted in my own bookstore, I find myself not checking out the books to be read, but looking at faces rather than covers. A museum of memory. Perhaps this is similar to the intention of what Ana Lucia calls “taking care of the past”, as staged property This is the relationship between memory and objects, the way they become repositories of absence.
Taking care of it involves postponing its forgetting, sometimes erasing the memory (another way of forgetting it) into something else, perpetuating it. That’s why I put letters and photographs in books, inserting them between the pages, because I want people to connect with these objects, and I hope that one day, if I forget them, they will surprise me. It’s a futile struggle against the inevitable, all the more exacerbated because now that I’m leaving, I know that leaving will be met not only with the novelty that awaits, but also with the bloodiest anonymity, the oblivion that sweeps away everything, the burial in multiple languages. Private.
(frasepzp1)
When packing, I chose not only books, but also memories and echoes of people. I wanted to take them all with me, but it was impossible. When I left so many behind, I noticed that the word absence took on another depth. I knew then that the risk was no longer what we were going to forget, but what we have been and have forgotten. Then I accepted the absence of preparation, neither to leave what was not left nor to receive what was unexpected. I acknowledged that there was no “instruction for taking care of the past,” because these things might not even be taught. Because leaving is not entirely leaving, or not just leaving, but breaking into many parts, splitting into pieces, allotting to those you don’t know how to stop loving, while increasing the space that separates them.
It may seem exaggerated, but every time I squeezed a hand, I felt a dizzy sensation. The squeeze shook my body, as if to say, this could be the last time. Because if life generally lasts two days, then in Guatemala, death is a timeout. I saw the stains on my parents’ hands, and they asked me again to repeat why they didn’t listen, and I couldn’t help but think of the inevitable. Then I tried to save their faces in my memory – and decided how to save them, in this style. commemorate——Because now I know that leaving is not exactly about leaving, but knowing that when you come back, many people may no longer be there.
Then I missed that teenage enthusiasm, that longing to get out there because I thought life was where it was. go out I thought coming back would be easy because nothing had changed here: love was waiting at the San Blas Pier, parental eternity lay ahead, friendships were forever. Yet it took me five years to come back, almost half the time it took Ulysses to complete his return to Ithaca. I learned of his return only when I threw away the low-floor mattress I had slept on for years and prepared to run away again. Now I know that leaving is not just about leaving, but about accepting that everything else will continue in your absence.
Leaving is not only about leaving, but about starting over, building a new beginning, taking advantage of opportunities to learn, and contributing to building other possible futures. In the future, leaving does not mean escaping, like many Guatemalans who want to leave the country, either because they cannot find opportunities or because they have no choice but to flee the violence, poverty and suffering around them. They embark on an uncertain path, full of dangers, with fragmented identities, families torn apart, driven away by the greed and negligence of a few. Therefore, I believe that leaving, for those of us who do not escape or do not escape at all, means having the responsibility to transform this land so that the word leaving no longer means pain and injustice.
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