Lost time
for Christmas i was given Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" vol.1 and i put it in my hand luggage for my 2 week trip back to Portugal. it was a trip planned to work on a book as well as to recover from the many stresses i had been through in the last few years. during the trip i always carried the book with me but i never read it. instead, the idea given by its title influenced my thoughts as i briefly returned to the country of my birth
having been ‘uprooted’ for the last 14 years, i have always felt more at home during a journey; i intensely observe the landscapes as i go with my camera as a poor method of recording the indescribable smells and views. it's never so much about what i see but more about how i see it: a new passenger is always a new mystery, a house in the fields a source of possibilities. "we could move there", i think, but i know i'd never do it. it's the dream part of populating the landscape with my presence which i find interesting. what could have been, if only. a traveller never really wants to 'stay'. instead, they want the world, especially when we’ve become so familiar with displacement.
increasingly, i am drawn towards spaces empty of people. returning to my birthplace has become more about recognising the absent than a search for new unfamiliar ones. even the barber shop attracted me, not because i had ever met the barber himself but because the obituary notice on the door announcing his death reminded me of everything i'd lost.
the few pieces that still stand are a few members of my extended family, my mother's house and one of my closest friend, Tó, whom i always visit and whose changes i notice each time we meet.
every time i see my grandmother she tells me this will be the last time; then she weeps. we always laugh about it, but i know once she's gone perhaps one of the strongest links to my past will be gone too. so i record the sound of her voice, as though i am trying to hold on to her, to the memories for which she holds a key.
only the trees remain the same, always, and when i think of which part of me still belongs there, i think about the trees which like me hold on to that ground with their roots
in my short walks around town old familiar faces of people i never really met personally show up once in a while. in those moments it feels like they are ghosts, temporarily awakened from a strange dream. in the end i realise: is me who is the ghost, allowed to return for another glimpse of a disappearing world, permitted to remain longer in a strange dream.
i hang on to unimportant moments; i see those as the most relevant to retain a memory, a sense of routine in a place as an antidote to building the myth. during the journey back home where I now live, the landscape is always emptier, less magical. i spend most of it sleeping, with a sense of defeat as though i am being forced back into a less interesting life: to go back to what i know.
still, i realise i'm lucky in that through certain places and people i can always in a way ‘go back’ and the lost time can still be found at the end of a similar journey, albeit each time more faded.
