truth is in all the frames

i am showing you a photograph taken three decades ago, somewhere in Luxemburg, most certainly by my father: you cannot see but my mother, my brother and my maternal grandparents were also in this shot. 

i’ve cut them out from the frame. 

it isn’t a lack of love - it never is - or a lack of care, and it is certainly not indifference. that dreamy young child needs to find herself before she can join the world again. 

a lot has happened between the moment she strikes her pose, almost as if she knew that someday her gesture will mean more than the moment it existed in. as if she knew that, no matter what, it is that very moment she will come back to again. 

so here i am, getting ready to disappear from your screens for a little while, in order to reframe the world around myself. not becoming a child, that is not what i am after. but to reclaim everything that has happened since then, through the many layers of my imagination. 

i am going to live inside my novel as i finish writing it, until it is ready to find you. it is quite practical: i need not to think about the world, about you, about projects, for a period of time. i need to be alone with my characters, with my memories, with my imagination. 

it is a demanding and fragile journey, a healing one. 

every scene, every new chapter feels like licking wounds - mine, yours, theirs. the body is present, and not only to make sure my head functions properly so that I can write. my body writes. the stories are carved in my flesh. the emotions live under my skin. writing keeps the blood flowing. tears and sweat don’t turn to ink, no, it isn’t that creepy, that cheesy. the body gives the space needed for the truth to exist and be expressed. 

i started to write this particular story three years ago, but it has been in the making for three decades. i didn’t know it then, as i was striking the pose of the dreamer on a summer trip to Luxemburg. now i understand the constant urge - to quote our mighty philosopher Don Draper - to travel back to a place we know we were loved. 

i do not intent my novel to act as a kind of nostalgia porn. but it sure is triggered by that wish to go again to that place we ache for. it is not childhood, it is not naivety, i believe it is acceptance. 

and the only way to get there, was to cut the frame. 

---