Memories

25/08/2023 Nilson Lattari

Memories are small documentaries that our minds connect through our lives. They won’t be a complete movie. They are small pieces of good or bad events which we have experienced in our lives.
When we are solitary, our memories materialize and fill the empty and silent spaces of our lives. And then, our memories have a crucial role to play in these moments. Memories are angels who help us in our sad and terrible moments. They are the best partners when we want to talk to someone or ourselves, and memories are toys we manipulate according to our pleasure and in times of reflection. We can modify them and distort them because memories are travellers through time, and the past becomes the present to imagine another future for us. Or a future that happens in our imagination. Memories are connections between prisoners and freedom. Memories are open albums to drive our internal camera to look around and reach our place in the world.
Nowadays, memories are the most valuable things that we have. Memories are the reasons to go on and exist in this life. They show us a possible world and give us hope to move on and create more memories.
Memories can be bad and can bring us terrible moments, sadness and at the same time, they are lessons to survive, lessons about what we can or cannot do. Memories can be enemies if we neglect them to be forgotten. It’s not easy to erase them from their places because they are traces and footprints in our life experiences.
What would happen to us, living in isolation and distant from people, if we hadn’t got memories to support us? They are evidence that we are alive and active. We are able to revisit these small documentaries to refresh our lives.
It’s time to forget the portraits of our past, images paralysed in time, because we have our memories to spin and move our virtual and abandoned bodies through the temporal space. Because of our memories, we are able to feel the smell of skin or the flavour of a kiss, the sound of the voice and the body language of our old lovers. Furthermore, the feeling of victory and the fear of the unknown when we are talking to our ghosts.
In ancient civilizations, including in many cultures today, memories belong to women who are always confined to passive isolation in their homes. While men go outdoors to live experiences in the world, and go back home to tell their stories. Women like mothers and grandmothers keep these memories of families alive and carry them into eternity. When they died, these beings left us here to live in a kind of orphanhood and a space to fill with new memories that we will create.
When we respect women, we respect memories, and when we hurt femininity, it’s like hurting our secrets, and putting our minds in turmoil. Mothers are women who know us in their silences, in their isolation, because they are the guardians of our memories.
Our memories belong to us, and they are similar to secrets that we keep inside us. Memories are winged superheroes that help us to overcome the bad moments of our existence. They can reveal our fragility or our resistance.
Memories are endless movies when we become the memories of someone else.