THE HOUSE INSIDE US

For many years I believed memory was an archive, a container in which to store facts, names, faces. Then time taught me something different: memory does not store. It dwells. It is not an archive. It is a place, with rooms, corridors, doors — some opened often, others closed for years, until something suddenly reopens them.

I have lived long enough to see people disappear, places transform, entire worlds dissolve. And yet something remained: memory, not as nostalgia, but as continuity. Nostalgia looks back. Memory connects. Memory can become a prison, or a library. It depends on how we use it. I did not want to live in the past. I wanted to dialogue with it.

Real geography and inner geography rarely coincide — there are cities where I lived for years that I remember little, and places crossed for a few days that keep living inside me. Memory does not measure time. It measures meaning. Two people can live the same event and remember it in opposite ways, because they do not keep the fact. They keep the meaning.

When I look back today, I do not see a sequence of years. I see places — inner places, some luminous, some difficult, all necessary. Memory does not serve to return. It serves to understand, to give continuity to what we have been. Memory is a place I keep on living in, together with everything that made me what I am.