1983: You are Always Here

We are all beings with the power to be in all places at all times. We collect images that act as memories, and sometimes the geography of our memories serves to highlight missing actions and uncharted choices. We hold on to these images, as an act of holding onto what we think is gone, as a way of asserting ourselves over an inevitable temporal trajectory.

“That is me—that is my mom—she is beautiful! —I miss my grandma—where is my dad? —there he is, he looks the same—I remember that place, I bet you is still there—the sun is warm...” My heart celebrates recognizing and beats faster, like the joyous accelerated clapping of the spectator.

That was me in 1983, a toddler discovering America for the first time. But it is also me today, knowing all I know, seeing what life has become, mystically residing in that same area with an updated form of that same car witnessing life, in love, with a toddler by my hand, again.

The magic of manifesting the physicality of these images, of externalizing them, is that they give us the chance to investigate their relationship to our memory and to realize that they are everlasting forms, outside of the flow of time. The investigated image becomes both past and future; personal nostalgia in its new form is nothing but a celebration of universal experience.