It’s a room. One, in a series of many. No one knows all of the rooms or how to get to them. There are endless nooks and evermore hallways. Everything is bare. Concrete floors and walls resemble a house of mirrors. Walking around is like living on Escher’s staircase. Your sanity swirls down the drain as sweat from your forehead floats up to the floor. There is a spark. Something glints in the distance and catches your eye. You see it more clearly as you round the corner. You step into a new room, one that you have been in many times before. The walls are plastered with thousands of little mementos, evenly shaped pieces of paper partially stuck to the wall. They move in the nonexistent breeze. Flowing, like a shooting star under a carpet. One near you seems to be glowing. It peels off. Its relationship with the wall is annulled. The yellow leaf is set ablaze as it floats into the sky and disappears. Most of these tiny fragments are yellow, faded with time. The rest are color-coded by year, with two digits inscribed on the back to mark the date. They have no other form of identity. No pattern. No reference. Whether a letter, a word, or even a sketch, all these defaced notes adhere to a wall. They are scattered to and fro, a mosaic portraying your life. There might be enough room for them all, and perhaps not. Everything is encoded and stored, but you cannot retrieve them. These memories have all been gathered up and shoved into a closet. The landslide as you open the door is large enough to kill you, or at least drive you mad. The door is opened. A gun materializes and rests against a stranger’s temple. This stranger is praying to a god. The walls around you suddenly burst into flames. Everything is ravaged and burned. Nothing survives, save for a small slab of stone that marks where he now rests. The last memory of a forgotten world.
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TEXT: MUGREN ALOHALY
ART: LAYLA MOHAMED