Homeland Delirium

This is the hardest letter to write. Words can’t do justice where justice has been abolished. I try to hold onto my memories with photographs. It is the only way to paint this phantasmagoria we’ve been living in. Their prose born out of abstraction, to photograph is the only way I know how to exist. As though forcefully we are being awoken from a dream, the more lucid we become, the more we face a nightmare. Time loses all its sense. From one day to the next, I no longer know the difference. In the stream of photographs, I wander through the landscapes to belong. The more I want to belong, the more I am estranged. The more, still, I fall in love. My heart palpitates with the sound of the leaves in a city with seven hills. Like all loves, at first we give ourselves to a child’s innocence forgetting all the pain we felt before. Wanting to believe is perhaps man’s worst enemy. Soon after, the fog surrounds us. We retrieve as a matter of survival. We begin to accept that we don’t belong in this world we are born into. We are still kids. We can’t stop believing nonetheless. We continue loving behind curtains, under the covers. Snow covers the hills once of our beloved city not long ago. Even the snow doesn’t visit us much anymore. As it melts, everything changes again from what we know. My time comes again. I wander to places once again in search of some hope. I traverse mountains and valleys. I touch the borders of forgotten people. Dire landscapes, I find, still have hope. I, in need of it, breathe it in. But time doesn’t wait for us. Soon after change comes again. Hundreds die in the bottom of the earth. Every time hope appears in our sight, someone turns off the lights. We are too young. The length of this struggle is beyond us. Still I mark frames of things I want to remember. I am gone once again. Ring of the telephone leads back to the images and a dark night begins. Someone once again turns off the lights. I keep going forward and backward to catch my breadth. Hundreds die, again. We wake up the next day in a different world. There landscape is painted with green and red. Bridges that once connected us become landmarks. History is dismantled. No longer can we ask the question of belonging. This feels like the longest night. From ashes we rise as though all that came before never happened. Is this just another attempt to believe? Myth surrounds us. Beneath our new shirts we bear scars but we can’t dare to speak. All we need is some time, simply some time. This pain is as old as our history. We can’t stop believing but my heart now lives in fear of the ground beneath me dissipating forever. I fear I won’t be able to fall in love again. My memories now seem so far away, and my photographs a lie. I, like you, get chipped away in a world that I no longer recognize, to which I feel I no longer belong. Desire endures. Desire takes over. Summer days begin to hold more than before. The World finishes its tour and nothing changes for the better. The music in our heads is nearly silenced. Let them talk what we can do in our privacy, or what we can’t while tourists travel beneath the sea. When all things turn quiet at night, and time feels still, lives are those built upon exception as we continue spinning towards delirium in each other’s arms.