Sketch of the Past

"With the desire to be loved, to be held close to the other shape; to put off the veil of darkness and see burning eyes." from "The Moment: Summer's Night", by Virginia Woolf

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"Pela ordem natural das coisas, enquanto a minha avó vivesse eu seria a jovem e a minha mãe estaria a salvo, protegida pelo flanco de duas gerações. Mas entretanto o coração da minha avó parou e eu já não sou jovem, tenho uma névoa de dor nos ossos, a luz escassa de alguns cabelos brancos. Afasto-me de espelhos."

Andreia C. Faria, Canto do Aumento

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"Bastar-me-ia a laranjeira no pátio, o último fogo dos dióspiros, os ossos bebendo o sol de Inverno. Eu podia ser feliz assim. Há exuberância na solidão, há vida. Mas uma mulher sozinha é um desastre para a economia."

Andreia C. Faria, Canto do Aumento

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Garry Winogrand, "Coney Island, New York", c. 1952

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"We aren't loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved."

Leslie Jamison, Splinters

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"Sometimes I felt the baby belonged to me absolutely. Sometimes when she lay sleeping beside me in her bassinet. I ran my fingers along my scar in the darkness: the thick stitches, the shelf of skin above like an overhang of rock. It was just a slit that led to my own insides, but it felt like the gateway to another world. The place she'd come from.

From the very beginning, there was a goodness in her. I knew it was nothing I had made."

Leslie Jamison, Splinters

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"In many photos from my childhood, my mother is embracing me—one arm wrapped around my stomach, the other pointing at something, saying, Look at that. To talk about her love for me would feel tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is. Just like it's meaningless to say our ordinary days meant everything to me, because they created me. I don't know any self that exists apart from them."

Leslie Jamison, Splinters

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"Children have a slow, silent way of transforming the atmosphere around them. They are so much more porous than adults, and their chaotic inner life leaks out of them constantly, turning everything that is real and solid into a ghostly version of itself. Maybe one child, alone, by himself, cannot modify the world the adults around him or her sustain and entertain. But two children are enough—enough to break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner life."

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

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"She fills the space in the car with the warmth of her cub breath, and talks to us from the backseat— long, incomprehensible stories that remind me of some of Bob Dylan's later song lyrics, post Christian conversion. Then, quite suddenly, she maybe tires of being in the world, becomes quiet, looks out the window, and says nothing. Perhaps it is in those stretched-out moments in which they meet the world in silence that our children begin to grow apart from us and slowly become unfathomable. Don't stop being a little girl, I think, but I don't say it. She looks out the window and yawns. I don't know if she sees the same world we see. The sun is setting, and the brutalized, almost lunar Oklahoma landscape stretches out indefinitely. Always defend yourself from this empty, fucked-up world, I want to say to her; cover it with your thumb. But of course I don't say any of this."

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

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Past Lives (2023).

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"That poem ends with a vow to the passing stranger: 'I am to see to it that I do not lose you.' It's a promise of permanence: this fleeting moment of intimacy shared between you and me, two strangers, will leave a trace, will reverberate forever."

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

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"Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?"

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive