Starting with Nothing

Fighting Loss, and losing a battle worth losing

I don’t think I told you this as yet, but I am writing about my experiences travelling and living abroad. I believe that it is a story worth telling. It is possibly one of the scariest decisions I’ve made, and remaking it at every other moment takes Herculean effort. More than anything, it feels like the story is about deepening my understanding of what home means. For some, it is a physical space. For others, it is proximity to the people you love. For those who have neither, it is a guessing game and much like creating a new reality that constantly feels out of reach.

Wherever I find myself, I take LOTS of photographs. Apart from writing and art, photography completes my creative triad. I take photographs on my phone, using different apps for that “just so” effect. I take photographs with my film camera, with different film types and speed. I take photographs with my digital camera, on automatic and in specific modes. I have a lot of photos neatly organised according to city and country. So with these elements combined, you have something like a record of my travels. A travelogue, if you will (and even if you won’t). I have two versions: the one I want published, and the other as a personal keepsake.

When I completed Draft Zero, I was spent. The process of identifying the countries and points of interest, finding memorabilia, revisiting travel journals and dredging up emails from my travels took nearly a year. As I was drafting, a lot of the writing was just day-to-day happenings—the itinerary. Nothing special. Nothing exceptional. Yet, some writing had visceral emotional energy that was hard to revisit and “craft”. It was not the happy-go-lucky project I had envisioned at the start, yet…

But I didn’t dare start editing. It was too soon. I was too close to the words to reshape them into something that felt “right” or “true”. Which is to say, “honest”. I was at a loose end. After much procrastination, I gathered all my art supplies and revisited all the memorabilia I used to to write Draft Zero. My Keepsake Travelogue became my creative project.

The Keepsake Travelogue felt different. It wasn’t designed for an audience. It was for me. The process has been amazing and jarring and unexpectedly emotional. I relived the memories and writing up stories that aren’t necessarily for public consumption. The process was time-consuming and life-giving. I did the work, alas haphazardly as one does in the last days of the year. Until. I discovered in my zeal to organise my photographs, I had deleted all my photographs of Mexico City. ALL of my CDMX photographs gone without me noticing until I did.

And when I did, I searched and checked and panicked (a little bit then a lot) before giving up utterly defeated. I accepted that I had nothing except memories. The days between Christmas 2023 and New Year 2024 lost in the timeline of another existence. I had no images to show that on the last day of 2023, I got up extra early to visit the art museums. It was a Sunday and they are free on a Sunday. The train was empty and the light filtered beautifully as I occupied a women’s only carriage. I breakfasted at the usually crowded but now empty Café De Tacuba and felt like an absolute rock star. I was among the first to enter The Museo Nacional de Arte as the doors opened, and it felt as if the entire gallery was mine and mine alone. I entered and exited many rooms without encountering anyone except the security. There were no photographs to show that I went to Finca Don Porfirio opposite the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and had a panoramic view as the sun moved across the sky. I curated the photographs “just so”, and you best believe that that was some of the best hot chocolate I had ever had. I lost the photograph of the mural Liberación o La Humanidad se Libera de La Miseria by Jorge Gonzalez Camarena that I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to photograph because it was so big and so many people were admiring it. I can’t even start to show you the energy I captured.

There is the equal tragedy of not being able to show you how I celebrated New Year’s Day. I got up extra early (for the second day in a row) and caught the train (also in a women’s only carriage) to the same spot. I had nothing to prove that before 9am on 1 January 2024 I had multiple shots of hard liquor (some tequila, some mezcal, some maleza, some better left unspoken). I took photographs at the Sun and the Moon pyramids in the once ancient city of Teotihuacan, just to show you how vibrant the colours still were or how intricate the carvings remained. I wanted to show you have the arts have survived literal millennia and to tell you that art lives beyond death.

In the same vein, I had no proof of my bus tours around the city, or the fact that the cost of visiting The Blue House (or The Frida Kahlo Museum if you insist) being absolutely worthwhile. I took photographs in Frida Kahlo’s house and had no damned evidence. I visited the Museo de Arte Moderno with all its quirks where the lights cut for nearly 3 minutes and as we were being ushered out of the building, the lights flicked right back on. I even explored the country’s most important museum, Museo Nacional de Antropología, and spent hours moving from room to room, level to level, and back again. I remember calling my grandmother as I was drinking coffee at the museum’s cafe. I wanted to show you how people were smoking weed in protest and how in a random subway, I found Viko Vegan Taco, overate and then ordered take-away. But I have no evidence of any of this. All I have are memories. When the realisation of the lost photographs hit me, all I felt at the time was numbness. Now, all that is left are these words.

If there is one thing I learnt in the days that passed, it is that I do not process grief. I subvert it. I pass over it. I do not move through it. I acted as if it didn’t matter. As if it was just another thing that happened, and had to be handled. But this loss shook something loose in me. Perhaps, it is my age. Perhaps, it was the head space I was in. Perhaps, I am ready to sit down and be with the losses I’ve “handled” over the years. Perhaps, I am ready to return to myself.