Polar Bear Literature Club | Memories are always wandering, pretending to be someone else

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When the spring wind begins to blow, my internal organs rumble. To be precise, a sound leaks from deep within my intestines, somewhere along the twisted tube.
The back alleys of Buenos Aires are coated in the sticky skin of a city where the scent of rain-soaked viscera and the remains of a melting cat cling, and colorless fruit crawls out from a trash can someone kicked over.

At the corner of Mirador Street, in the crumbling brick bar "Oscuro," Luck Ra's "Qué Sed" was playing from deep within the speakers. The percussion, groaning as if played in reverse, carried the unseverable sentimentality of this country, as if asking, "Why are you here?"

I was one of the bar's regulars.
The customers were always the same. Pablo, a failed poet with a scar on his chin; Solan, who kept changing their gender; and Manuel, a man with a squint who had forgotten how to speak.
The counter was painted a blood-red black, with claw marks of some kind left behind.

Every night, they talked about the world.
Labor, taxes, and cryptocurrency. The village in the north that sank in a flood, the island that was closed off due to an epidemic. The missing professor who used to be a member of the bar.

The world is always dying, but no one actually dies—that's what's terrifying, Solan said. Beside them, Pablo was crying. No one asked why those tears were shed.

I left Japan when there were still remnants of an era where coughing was a crime. That feeling persists stubbornly within the city, and the collective is still afraid to breathe. Since then, I have always felt short of breath. Even though I can no longer remember why, I have traveled the world taking photographs.

The night I first came to "Oscuro," it was the gay professor who bought me a beer. I didn't understand even half of it, but it was also he who gave me a "lecture on memory and photography." The professor's jacket had leather patches on the elbows, and it smelled of a mixture of cigarettes and lime. He tried to touch me, saying you can tell a gay man here by the shape of his neck, but Manuel stopped him.

One day, the professor suddenly disappeared.
In his studio, he left behind a half-read copy of Roland Barthes' "Camera Lucida," a Robert Mapplethorpe photo book, and a letter addressed to me. It read as follows.

《Memories belong to no one, they are the color of blood, and they are always wandering, pretending to be someone else.》

Influenced by the photographer Saul Leiter, I was obsessed with capturing fragments of red and light. However, lately, I couldn't help but feel that my eyes were seeing dead colors. Red disappeared from the scenery I viewed through the viewfinder, red was no longer red, and I felt that the moment I captured it, I would disappear myself. The day after I told the professor this, he vanished.

A woman came to the counter with a staggering gait and handed me a dirty Polaroid photo.

"The professor died on the other side of the river in Villa Lugano."

It was a slum where the smell of iron and blood drifted. The professor had no family, and it seems there was no funeral. The men peered at the photo and fell silent.

I decided to go to that place.
Behind a massive public housing complex, in a vacant lot that seemed to be sinking into the mud, was the small ruin the woman had told me about. When I opened the broken door, a large number of Polaroids were scattered inside the concrete box.
I picked them up one by one. In one of them, there was the shadow of the professor, as thin as a stray dog, standing behind me. On the back, it was scribbled:

《Photography is death sealed within life. But sealed memories do not rot.
Are you still alive?》

A rare spring wind blew. The photos danced up in the windowless ruin.
I watched until sunset as the Polaroids burned in the sunlight.

At night, when I returned to the bar, Solan handed me a brand-new roll of film.

"Shoot, with living colors."

Solan added that they had forgotten they were holding a dozen rolls for the professor.
I decided to try believing the professor's words. The reason I couldn't capture red anymore was because I had started to forget myself.

I took my camera out of my pocket, loaded the film, and released the shutter toward the window, which was wet with humidity. The sound echoed through the bar as if forgiving the world.

The light from the glass window reflecting the lighting looked strangely red.
My internal organs rumbled quietly again. That sensation alone was my truth.
Someone was playing a guitar in the back of the shop.
The chords were messy, but they were miraculously beautiful.

End

#PolarBearLiteratureClub

# I participated in the fun project that starts with Spring Wind.