My dear Anggi,
Right now, I’m recalling the conversation we had in the car in June, holding her sides of what is left behind.
Isn’t it so strange, that feminine nouns are used to name an object that’s used in the darkness of sweltering nights? Bizarre.
She is freezing, her temperature can reduce the other’s heat while they’re sleeping. Then we hugged her, sweeping every adorable thing. At the same time, the abyss of her freely moves while her body is only moved by other people. It was probably an extremely humid night, the landscape was sweating, the colors were wet, and only her awakened state could witness the humidity. Deep darkness is seeing the shadows of two people made by one person and her. No need for a blanket to protect their weak skin. The silence can only be broken by her intensive living, their gestures evacuate the worlds of fancy.
She is unknown and still lives together with us. I believe she can be collectively sensed because she is sculpted by the landscape’s memory. You and I instinctively know it, while others left her. Therefore, outside of here, this is no better than a rumor or unrealizable fairytale. The forgotten landscape is inscribed in her. The former landscape of desiccation and the place of inoperable spirit. When we initially took the journey to find her together, we didn’t expect that we could mark ourselves outside of the country. We wandered around all the corners of little villages. Because it has been next to us, just like a ghost, the scattered body mediates with the transition of visible to invisible, with the feminine name living.
In the end, she is just a ghost. When we woke up from a dream in a bamboo grove, we felt confused about whether we were finding ourselves or chasing after her. Her body has been bluntly objectified. But must we be like that, just as this is an unknown figure of hers? You also said that my stories are flickering while my bones are rusty and restless.
And that our grandmother was also close to it. They might sit down and move her hands, which are heavy like stone. After I said that, we were silent for a long time. We were widely moving our bodies scattered on the boundary of generations, while she became a place where we met. Our memories and senses of the place that belongs to her are equally indistinguishable and vaguely intertwined.
But it’s not about my memory, it’s about the memories of her. Can you distinguish between them?
They are (un)touchable memories made in dreams during humid nights. Whenever I look for these fragments, they’re always missing or lacking because only half of them engage with the land. The others are traveling outside. Even though she is called by different pronunciations, her abstract roots can be found in elsewhere’s blanket. Her cartography is constantly rotating. Finally, every day when I embrace her. I see her pulmonary artery, heart, skeleton, eyelids, and countless hairs more vividly than I could have seen with my own eyes. The repeated foreshadowing of that body. The meaning of the bodies and specific names is unclear, there is no source. Maybe she’s not living for metaphor anymore, but she awoke, unfurled, and moves, epiph.
It reminded me of a scene where I was alone but it actually strengthened my presence. She is a riddle. But there is nothing ambiguous about it. Repeated gestures of day and night, the vocabulary of humidity, temperature and the density of transparency of an object; everything revealing the randomness of its name.
Who is she, and how long has she dreamed for?
Take care,
Aram
19-05-2022