Sometimes I find myself missing the life I had before unlocking your silhouette in the catalog of my mind. Before knowing of you, I wandered without knowing I wanted to find you, with no idea that you were there, in the background, and that it was only a matter of time.
But now that you’ve entered my life, I catch myself searching for your trace in the depths of the memory chest and consulting the recollections of when I didn’t know you existed, though you were there all along. We had already crossed paths while looking the other way.
One day, you were a person in the background of photographs, and now I can recognize you in the crowds.
And I don’t know why it intrigues me so much to imagine you under the roofs and upon the floors where I’ve also been, perhaps trying to confirm that it was already written, predestined even, that, even if I didn’t see you and you didn’t see me on countless occasions, one day we would meet because we had to. Because it was inevitable.
I don’t bitterly regret finding you, but I dare to acknowledge the feeling that such an event unleashed as something like an itch, perhaps a sting.
An instinctive call you can ignore forever: as long as you don’t see it, don’t hear it, don’t remember it exists, don’t know that you feel it. But once you locate it, it burns exponentially, keeping you awake.
Suddenly, you discover a side of yourself that is always sensitive, complaining about the roughness of the wind’s touch and leaving stains of blood on your clothes.
Until it becomes a wound you feed, knowing that the more you touch it, the less it heals. A growing abrasion that opens like a window into your inner self, where a little of your soul peeks out, and whose scab you compulsively peel away again and again.
A year from now, its shadow will still accompany you, decorating the permanent stain of a makeshift patch, an addition of topography on the map of your skin. Evidence that, at that moment, you felt everything in living flesh, and now its mark has become part of you.
Photography by Nicholas Dominguez Gallegos.
Apprentice of everything. A wandering soul, neither from here nor there. A case of trinkets, treasurer of memory, and collector of longings.