When I try to figure out who I am, I imagine threads. Connections, an alive network that links places, memories, people. I suppose that this is what gives me some sense of identity. Part of what I am is what I studied and what I work in, but also where I studied it, and when. Certainly with whom. Crossing the path of a then recently hired professor made me a data scientist. After drinking a coffee with a fellow climber and hearing that he switched from engineering to architecture, I switched from physics to biology. I remember the first time I saw M. 30 years ago in Caracas, Venezuela. I still meet her in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she lives.
And yet there are severed threads, incomplete ones. There are places that does not exist any longer, or even worse, that have lost any trace of my presence. A bare-concrete column, at the stairs from the first to the second floor of el Unicentro El Marquez, a shopping mall in Caracas, is where J. and I kissed again and again, where we wrote our names in chalk. For long years after, a faint trace of the script remained. I suppose that this is what we can aspire, what we are. Traces, erasable, on the hard surfaces that we tried to make ours. I guess that we need to reconcile with the idea of those molecules of chalk, even when they stubbornly, perhaps desperately, grabbed the concrete surface and yet were blown away, dispersed, disappeared in the air of the city, gone.
But I refuse to let them go.
There are couple of persons that I have lost track of. And in nights like this, where the need of write hitches with memories that I can’t quite place, they show up, well defined and gone from my threads. I don’t even know if they are alive. So I search for them, I google this, and I google that, I scan photos and photos and some more photos. Now and then I come up with some other keyword, with some other association. But I have no success, and the ones that are gone, remain gone.
It is strange. I know how the threads of the houses that are no more, or the friends that died are closed, ended. But what about those persons that I can’t find? I have some idea where do they live, so I count time zones and imagine what could they be doing. Or perhaps they travelled? migrated? I liked to believe that the idea of a threaded identity is that I am not central, or crucial, I’m like one knot in an immense fabric, in a multidimensional fabric. Unique, without doubt, but not central. And yet I see now that I still look at the fabric from my perspective, from the persons that were attached to me once, from the ratios that go away from me, those rays that I try to follow and close. I realise that I might not care that much about them, but about me not knowing what they are, where they are, how they are. It’s me, this piece of dust that will disintegrate in few decades more, the thing that wants to know.
And so now I think in ourselves as that, as knots that are gradually and slowly losing connections to the thread, that thread that is being grown somewhere else right now. No matter how we try, how we grasp the fibres that knot me, that anchor us, they will fade, old and tired as we will be. And eventually we will be that, knots that lost their lines to others, fading away.
untethered.