"The moon was less a stranger than you were."–Bertolt Brecht

Rummaging through an old email account, I came across a section of photos that had been sent between 2000 and 2007, by me, by this or that person. There were photos of the Californian coastline, of interiors of houses I will never visit again, of people I no longer know, of myself as a baby and as a young woman being kissed by a man I haven’t seen in eleven years. They were images from a primordial world, a vast realm populated by peculiar animals: this self I no longer recognised.

I had known, even loved, these people and then, by some trick of time, I stopped knowing or loving them. All that feeling, severed and forgotten so easily, except in a chance encounter with a photo album. How things return to you and have no more meaning beyond the fact of what was lost: traces of love, fossilised in a gesture or a glance.

There is no protection from change. It is a life’s constant, and so I guess is memory, memory of the lost homeland, whether that homeland was a place or a person or a way of being. Also constant is amnesia, as a way of coping with change. You have to forget, or else you'd get overcome by it all.

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