Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

Moving in together had been a rash decision—messy, confusing, urgent, and as beautiful and real as life feels when you’re not thinking about its consequences.

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?

refugee is someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived.

But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

Beginnings get confused with endings.

Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long.

Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.

Generosity in marriage, real and sustained generosity, is hard. If it implies accepting that our partner needs to move one step farther away from us, and maybe even thousands of miles away, it’s almost impossible.

We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises.

In marriage, there are only two kinds of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.

I imagine other lives—different, but maybe not that different from mine. Some people, when they sense that their lives have reached a stalemate, dynamite everything and start over. I admire those people: women who leave men, men who leave women, people who are able to detect the moment when the life they once chose to live has come to an end, despite possible future plans, despite the children they may have, despite next Christmas, the mortgage agreement they signed, the summer vacation and all the reservations made, the friends and colleagues whom they will have to explain things to.

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.

Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.