Memory Lines by Alemsah Ozturk

Memory Lines, No. 81

The first version was probably nicer.

More beautiful. More balanced. Easier to look at.

But every time I looked at it, it felt incomplete.

So I painted over it.

I covered things I liked. Destroyed parts that worked. Added, erased, buried, revealed. Until the first painting was still there, but no longer completely accessible.

And maybe that is what memory actually is.

We think we remember the original.

But every time we return to a memory, we paint over it a little. Time changes it. Emotion changes it. What happened afterwards changes what happened before.

Eventually, what remains isn’t the memory itself.

It is the residue of remembering.

The lines that somehow survived everything we put on top of them.

Memory Lines.

This is where I begin.