Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

And recording sound, we thought, as opposed to filming image, gave us access to a deeper, always invisible layer of the human soul, in the same way that a bathymetrist has to take a sounding of a body of water in order to properly map the depth of an ocean or a lake.

We never imagined that one day, we would somehow have lost each other amid the crowd.

I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.

“Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.”

And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering?

We were both back to chasing our old ghosts—that, at least, we still shared. And now that we were each venturing out on our own again, and somehow also returning to the places we had each come from, our paths were dividing. It was a deeper chasm than we’d expected.

You just have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time.

Unhappiness grows slowly. It lingers inside you, silently, surreptitiously. You nourish it, feeding it scraps of yourself every day—it is the dog kept locked away in the back patio that will bite your hand off if you let it. Unhappiness takes time, but eventually it takes over completely. And then happiness—that word—arrives only sometimes, and always like a sudden change of weather.

from the metallic intestines of the train, a sound like a thousand souls shrieking can be heard all the while, as if to pass through the desert, it had to crush nightmares in clusters.

know that I’ve begun to drift outward, from the nucleus of them, farther away from the center of gravity that once held my everyday life in orbit. I’m sitting in this tin can, falling away from my daughter and son, and they are my Ground Control, falling away from me, the three of us being pulled apart by gravity.

some lines from a poem he liked, by Galway Kinnell: When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.

The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.

The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather—more a whimper than a bang.

The desert is an enormous, motionless hourglass: sand passing by in time detained.