THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

by Lorena Moreno Vera

Disappearance is unforgiving, as well as a sure destiny. It even becomes a threat that drives our survival instinct. Everything is prone to disappear, just as time itself. We traverse in a continuous fluctuation between the fragile and "illusory" preservation of a past and a present that emerges as an untenable event that disappears at the very moment of its utterance.

ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum¹

We are an incarnate accumulation of records of age, wear, injuries, and the impression of its actions, the somatics of space and time.

(1) "Nothing that has been heard can be repeated with the same words.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” Collected Fictions, Trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 134.