tidy
testua / text by: xabier gantzarain argazkiak / photos: ursus wehrli
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If you’re at home on a Saturday afternoon, and you realise that enough reasons have stacked up for you to commit suicide, your best years are long past, life’s absurd, hanging around’s all that’s left for you, it’s better to be a failure, maybe to write something.
You want to give shape to the world, tidy up the painful erosion caused by everyday life, tell the story of your life, leave something behind you, not for anyone else, just for your own sake. And you start writing: “It’s Saturday afternoon, you’re alone at home, you’ve felt so alone for such a long time, you’ve started to tidy up your memories, just in case you have to leave the world before your time is up, and you don’t know where to start from. You can give some information, your name, surname, age, place of birth, passport number, the money in your current account right now, all your possessions, the colour of your eyes, and then you can start saying what your life has been until now”.
You start writing, but then you have doubts, who am I, the dates, what my parents told me, what I tell myself, what other people think about me, the information they keep about me in all sorts of files, my academic record, my cv, which one I am, and you open a new file on your computer, the novel, and inside that you open lots more new files, me, Dad, Mum, my brother, my sister, siblings, family, friends, town, school and you don’t know how long the list could go on for and you stop, and you open a file called World, and you can’t decide what to open up inside that, perhaps you should start with your country, or the century, or the year, maybe that’s the best thing, there the diaries are, that’ll be the easiest thing, you’ll be able to start in the year you were born, 1975, and then carry on until today, year by year, and in that way your tale will be neat, year by year.
You’re not convinced by that. Not by giving your data, not by organizing everything year by year. Or maybe you are, maybe all the different ways of organizing things are fine, alphabetical, mathematical, what could you say about yourself without words or numbers. But do make sure you write neatly.
You want to give shape to the world, tidy up the painful erosion caused by everyday life, tell the story of your life, leave something behind you, not for anyone else, just for your own sake. And you start writing: “It’s Saturday afternoon, you’re alone at home, you’ve felt so alone for such a long time, you’ve started to tidy up your memories, just in case you have to leave the world before your time is up, and you don’t know where to start from. You can give some information, your name, surname, age, place of birth, passport number, the money in your current account right now, all your possessions, the colour of your eyes, and then you can start saying what your life has been until now”.
You start writing, but then you have doubts, who am I, the dates, what my parents told me, what I tell myself, what other people think about me, the information they keep about me in all sorts of files, my academic record, my cv, which one I am, and you open a new file on your computer, the novel, and inside that you open lots more new files, me, Dad, Mum, my brother, my sister, siblings, family, friends, town, school and you don’t know how long the list could go on for and you stop, and you open a file called World, and you can’t decide what to open up inside that, perhaps you should start with your country, or the century, or the year, maybe that’s the best thing, there the diaries are, that’ll be the easiest thing, you’ll be able to start in the year you were born, 1975, and then carry on until today, year by year, and in that way your tale will be neat, year by year.
You’re not convinced by that. Not by giving your data, not by organizing everything year by year. Or maybe you are, maybe all the different ways of organizing things are fine, alphabetical, mathematical, what could you say about yourself without words or numbers. But do make sure you write neatly.
