A Deserted Museum of Cherished Memories

How can life become nothing but memories?

All we can do is close our eyes—to remember it, to summon it in our distant fantasy. We try to grasp it, hoping to let it happen again! How can we be caught in a shining past and blurred future? We cannot take a step toward it without having to step back twice. Our life has become memories, as if it were a precious museum. In it, we have stored our sweet and bitter moments: delighted words from beloved friends, a surprise from our family, a proud glance from our father. There is the feeling of the moment that we achieved an arduous dream, the pause wrapped in the taste of coffee, and the beauty of walking in the rain after a dry season... All of these tender and passionate feelings that we have been missing for a while, leaving us with nothing but experiences that make our hearts quake.

Now we can feel the bitterness of coffee without drinking it—and even if we drink it, its taste has changed. My mom says, "The taste of the coffee changes with its drinker’s mood." Similarly, we can feel the lean seasons without falling the rain; because there are no raindrops that can cleanse our hearts of grief. We lost our beloved people, but we don't own but their words and their images in the dark. They left without farewell or any instructions we could do it for them. They left to take a rest, and to let us proceed the journey—if we still have the strength!

Nevertheless, the unbearable reality is this: if our joyful recollections are poured into objects, they can be annihilated with a one touch on a meticulously crafted remote, yet daring to oppose the master of that remote is unthinkable, so in the same way our places that hold all the memories are destroyed along with them, just as the friends we once laughed with have been killed. And if they did not destroy it, they have forced us to burn it, I heard from the people here, they have been burned their belongings—and the memories that held in them—with their recoiling hands and their fiery tears. To use them for temporary purposes, they forced them to burn their child's bed, where a baby once slept, or burn treasured books or even an entire library; to use its wood and paper to cook their food on the fire!

Our current life passes, but our words and speech are about the past—on the time before this merciless war. Many of our words take the form of expressions like, "Do you remember when we were...?" or "When did we visit that place before it was destroyed?" On the other hand, our words are about the anonymous future, that there is nothing we can do but wait, we let it to the time; because we do not have any other choice!

However, if they have controlled our physical belongings that carry the weight of our memories, they cannot control the memories stored in our minds. These memories are delicately woven, like exhibits in an abandoned museum. Whenever a similar event occurs a word, a smile, even a glance—that once existed in the museum—it opened many doors, letting the light shine again, and reviving a smile, though we have forgotten how to create it now. We alone hold the keys to those doors, and we have freedom to imagine them, to reclaim some of the joy we are missing today.

Let us live in the illusion of our joyful memories, beyond anyone’s control, we will roam through those doors, swinging them open and shut at our will, and whenever we choose. It is not wrong to seek life in memory; what is wrong is waiting for the closed doors to open—whether they are the doors of our future or the doors of change in our present circumstances, we hear them slam shut and feel the heavy weight of the silence that follows echoing in our ears. Yet the owners of these keys are merciless—and we do not even wish to encounter them, not even in our dreams!