Why am I thirsty?

Why do I have memories?

Why am I thirsty?

How can I so clearly peek into the past when the music runs throughout my head, through the mirror with tunes from times away? I see my reflection. I see yesterday, but never can hand in hand with the present. I have to take my gaze away from one in order to let the lyrics carry me to what used to be my day-to-day, now so distant that I can only remember it when by coincidence I hear, smell or touch something that kick me back to yesterday. Back to the green staircases and the first love from far away. walks in the forest. not knowing how a washing machine worked. Sharing a room between 3:00 am colour neon lights, dirty socks and instant meals stacked up on top of a microwave. Back to the first freedom.

All the firsts have now run their course into nothing other than a vague taste of what it was like to wake up every morning at 4:00 am to make it on time to the kitchens where we were all mindlessly chopping onions by daybreak. I want to remember things I thought as precious and brought with me from miles away, storing them in the wooden drawers of the first room I had away from home. But I can’t remember much more than the rhythm of scaling fish, picking herbs, planting more, separating yolks, running for the prawns, filling cups with salt. Before sunrise, after sunset, with only a half and our brake. Yes Chef!

The stops the bus made, and the hills between my bed and the pans with sizzling oil I cannot really recall. I do remember another one, dressed in black, feet in crocks, and knives hanging from his back, every morning the same time. I know I had some thoughts, I know I waned to run, but where?

And with a blink, I’m back to the present, an inch away from my own nose reflected off this systematically placed mirror in front of a motel bed. Another life, another me, now with less hair, sunken eyes, not even a mouth I recognize. It’s exciting when the road is new, and look is not enough to anticipate what lies ahead. But now I’ve changed, and so has the path that seems to be going toward abandoned questions, answers to which I haven’t fund. I pick up the questions as if they were pieces of something that I was supposed to find in order to make a new way. The trouble is, the pieces I find for the most part don’t make sense. Each is a complete different mess. So different, so disorganized. They don’t fit with one another and makes me wonder who I was.

who am I?

But I see them and I get excited, and then I get sad because I remember all the doors I used to walk trough are now gone. Through each door, I was talking in a different way, walking with a different stride, dressed in a different shirt, with different groceries in each bag. Sometimes it was black pants, or a red winter jackets with boots or sandals, with all kinds of people in all kind of cars. Forests, rivers, cobbled stones, Chinese market, trains at night. What a sight, the doors of the past, what beauty to remember holding that one first hand. And hidden in one, I recall the moment I locked eyes with the one person who managed to jump from door to door, skipping between my present, future and past, the only touch back to reality I can find. Because everything has changed and I’ve changed. I can’t find myself, and searching has proven fruitless now that I feel like I’m slowly being dragged into a current of sameness that picks up speed with the ticking of time. I don’t know how to get out of this current, this thing that drags me and I doubt is taking me somewhere nice.

How should I leave? Where shall I find new windows waiting be open so I can jump into the next portion of this fragmented life?

I want to shut my eyes, make everything dark, and move voluntarily somewhere at least knowing that it is not going back. I don’t know anything about new doors, new clothes, new people and roads. I don’t know of anything that hasn’t evaporated. And only in this darkness can I see the most important things where never the dreams, but the one who had them.