I’m young and lost. Twenty-two years ago I was born on a rainy Sunday, and that’s all I can remember. It is because I’ve lost my memory. I found my head tied with a white bandage, my body secluded into a room filled with white sheets and the smell of chloroform. Every night I go to bed with chloroformed nurses, have bits and pieces of chloroformed sleep, cardboard boxes with nightmares on which the word fragile is written. My nightmares are fragile because they stink. I never find out the source of that stench. One of the nurses told me dead bodies smell like the burnt feathers of an angel’s wing. Where could I find one of these angels, I asked the nurse, and she did not reply. The next day she told me, you wanna see angels, keep onto your life with those teeth. What about the hands? Aren’t they for holding onto something? I have two hands, but what shall I do with them, memories don’t reach out of the darkness with their cancerous pseudopod. I have even stopped trying because darkness is like nausea. No, she said, hands are not for that. Nobody came to visit me today, but I know that tomorrow will be the same scenario: mothers and fathers will come to my bed and caress my forehead and say nice things, but at the same time they will be far away while doing that, their mouths tied, their eyes covered with their hands. They can’t see me now because I got lost into the yellow paper of letters, my visage distorted in words, tears and sorrows turned into verbs, and nouns and adjectives. How shall I say this to you? I don’t remember what happened to me yesterday. It is the war they say, but I don’t trust words because I got lost in these words.

Another mother came in today, and I said hello, who are you, and she said I am your mother. Another father came in today, and I said hello, and he said hello son. I didn’t trust him because old men use the word son loosely. Another man said he was my brother, but I couldn’t trust him either, maybe we were brothers just like that, linguistically. Then nobody came anymore and I tried once more to thrust my palms forward hoping to grasp just for one second one of those memories left in the dark. When you are under the water you can’t get hold of the sky, the clouds. So you breathe hoping that one morning you’ll weak up a fish. You see, I’m afraid that is not possible. I remember words but I can’t remember those moments in which certain words were uttered. Then I would know that mother and father once pertained to the words we associate with those human beings that had participated in pulling this rotten bloodline open for multiplicity.

A very young doctor came in today, he was very handsome. He checked my lungs to see if there was something wrong. He said there was nothing wrong. I asked him, what are lungs for, and he said lungs are for breathing. The nurse told me that last night I had one of my fragile nightmares again because I was thrusting my hands forward in my sleep. I said to her that I wanted to get my memories back. She said memories don’t have hands. Why do we have hands, nurse? Not to have wings she said.

Then the next day there was another stream of mothers and fathers and brothers. They told me that their presence might help my memories grow hands.

That is not possible I said, memories do not have hands. And besides, they are all made out of words.

You see, memories do not cling to words. Memories are not like words, they don’t get stuck to the stream of air that comes out of your lungs. You see, words are stupid, they think that getting out is a form of redemption. They don’t know that the instant they go through the mouth they evaporate into thin air. There are cemeteries of words out there.