The door painfully moaned open, like an ancient giant yawning after a deep, long sleep. His breath is musty; stale…

“How long has this place been closed?”
“Oh, maybe ten years? Ever since you left your stuff here and started travelling off to weird places like Taboga.”
“Tobago”
“Whatever,” he replied, hobbling along, trying to balance his spectacles on his thin nose. It always fascinated me as a child: how he managed to balance those gigantic glasses on such a short, pointy nose.
“… they’re all in Asia.”

He started to cough; an unpleasant cough, one that, since I was only five, had recognized as a sign of danger.
“It’s okay; I’ll be fine on my own. If I find any crawlers I’ll just run out screaming my head off. No worries.”
He smiled; a resigned smile, showing a happy willingness to accompany me on my journey, as well as a resigned understanding of my desire to do this alone.
“I always want to do things alone,” I reflected, slowly tip-toeing my way into the dimly lit attic, one eye on the boxes arranged in a miniature maze, another scanning the floor and walls for any “uninvited guests”.
I crouched down in front of the nearest box, gently lifting its lid amidst the swirls of dust. So much dust… I wonder where dust comes from? A few sneezes and sniffles later, I begin to rummage through the contents of the old mystery: school books, notebooks, papers, and very few pictures.
“Why waste the moment behind a camera, trying to preserve it, instead of just live it and preserve it in your memory? Then instead of having an image, you have a scene, a feeling, a sound, a smell… you have the moment itself instead of just an image of it.”
Those are my words whenever anyone tries to get behind a lens and snap a picture.

I opened the next box. This one is more interesting; full of odds and ends. A couple of books: novels, collections of short stories, poems, along with some other books about astrology, numerology, palmistry… I remembered a time when I was interested in these “sciences”; they gave me a sense of peace and security, maybe predictability. Then I found other things, unidentified objects: a small bouncing ball, a colored marble, an old bracelet…
“Aah!”
I jump up and start to slap my legs crazily to scare off whatever was crawling against them. I’m sure I felt it, there was something, creeping up my leg. I look around… and realize…
It was just the corner of the box.

I take a deep breath and sit down again, digging deeper into the box. Something glistening catches my eye… It keeps escaping, hiding under layers and layers of odds and ends. I start to take things out, making a mess of the floor around me, until I find it, trapped in the corner, nowhere to escape.
A lens.
A broken lens, black rimmed, hazy with dust. I slowly wipe away the dust with the corner of my shirt. I stare at the lens. I stare into the lens.

I see a room: a dark room. A little girl is standing in the corner, next to a table, carefully eyeing the mysterious object in front of her. She stretches out her fingers, carefully, as if cautiously trying to pet a small animal. The animal does not move. She gently strokes its smooth, black metal with her fingertips. She picks it up, slowly cradling it in her little hands, sits down on the ground, and stares at it. She stares through its lens, through the eye, and she sees the world in black and white. She stares through the other side, and sees nothing but circles and darkness.
She hears footsteps: her eyes widen with fear. She quickly picks it up to put it back on the table, but gets tangled in the neck strap. She trips, falls... right on top of the camera.
The footsteps are quicker, faster now. There’s shouting, cursing, angry screams. There’re tears. There’ve been many tears since their family shattered. He throws the camera against the wall, face burning with rage, walks out the door; slams it behind him.

I never saw my father again.


I walk out of the attic, full of unwanted memories, thoughts and emotions, all uninvited, taking over my head in a spiraling storm, like the one I just brewed out of dust in the attic. I’ve travelled all over the world: from Brazil to Japan to Iceland to South Africa to France to India, even to weird places you might not know of, like Tobago. I’ve been through thick and thin, storms, floods, droughts, monsoons, rain. I’ve slept under the stars, with nothing but a thin blanket in weathers too extreme to describe. I’ve seen war. I’ve seen famine. I’ve seen poverty. I’ve seen anger. I’ve seen hatred. I’ve seen sadness. I’ve seen regret.

Yet no journey is as treacherous as my journey to the past.