Recently I retold a story that I forgot about for a long time. I must have told it many times around the time it actually happened. This time I've noticed some gaps that I did not know how to fill, and I was getting this odd feeling: "perhaps this never happened?". I was puzzled as I don't make up such stories; I have no reason to, I find enough interest and weirdness in reality not to come up with lies. Well, judge for yourself:

I was in a city, I don't remember in which city or in which country. That particular part of the city, I was not familiar with. I somehow ended up in that part and my glasses' frame broke, and so I found an optician shop. I remember it more like a hardware shop: There was an old man behind a counter. The counter ust have had a pane to shut it, or shutters, and since I don't remember entering through a door, that counter was on the street. I am not sure what kind of an optician shop is open to the street like a food stall... My story fails in the introduction and I have no memory to help it up.

I handed the old man my glasses to fix, and told him that I will just wait, as I have no replacement for them. He said "come back in an hour", so I carefuly made my way across the road to a park and sat on a bench. I can't see a thing without my glasses, and I have no memory of how I passed that hour; imagination and memory here intertwine.

When the hour was up I went over to the counter, the old man was handling something. He looked at me and said "Hello there, how can I help you?", I told him I left him my glasses to fix an hour ago, and he went to a back room for a while. He didn't appear to recognise me. When he finally came back, he looked at me with that same look, as if my presence distracted him from some task, and said again "Hello there, how can I help you?". I had no choice but to repeat that I left my glasses with him and he was just fetching them. I then pointed at what he was holding, as it looked familiar in that blur. Those were my glasses he was holding.

This time round telling the story, I couldn't follow through; as I was telling it I saw it made no sense, and I had to stop. I remembered how my dad told me a few times that often it happens to him. A story that was told many times and is no longer his. Remembering a retelling and not the memory.

A similar category of un-truths I experienced as a child. Stories of others that appealed to me, and I willed them mine. My brother was one such hero, the stories of his wars with the greater neighborhood gangs, the stories of a braver, more solid generation that felt much more valid than our own, five years younger, too late, and so unprepared.

The images here are from a notebook I started on June 2025 and finished in July 2026, it was hard going. Airports, hospital, death. Memories of places I haven't visited for 25 years, and even when I did visit, I never really stopped.

The method of drawing is a bit hardcore. I start not knowing where it is going. I learned not to mind the embarrassment, not to mind people interpretations, their remarks about my subconscious. I feel that the subconscious is common it is not mine.