TE20 Migrant Mosaics

A Girl’s Story

metal button for the light at the end of a black cable running down the side of the doorframe, a kind that has not been in use for many years. The button replaced an earlier one, which has left a mark above. I am not trying to remember; I am trying to be inside this cubicle in the girls’ dorm, taking a photo. To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment in which I am a girl of nearly nineteen, taking a photo of a place she knows she’s about to leave forever. When I gaze intently at the door bathed in white light, a flood of auditory sensations is unleashed. The hourly pealing of the bell, the sharp clap of hands that woke us up at half past six as the dormitory warden made her rounds (a girl from a poor family employed by the nuns), her “Hail Mary, full of grace” echoed in sleepy murmurs that rose from the cubicles (but not mine). The creak of the floor in front of my cubicle, the footfalls of a girl coming in from class, the bang of her door that makes the whole partition shudder, a song she sings to herself as she puts away her things. Gardez vos joies, gardez vos peines. / Qui sait quand les bateaux reviennent. / Amour perdu ne revient jamais plus. 1 That is when I’m truly there, plunged into the same desolation and expectation, or rather the sensation of something impossible to put into words, as if the fact of being there again put an end to language.

This room is the real that resists, whose existence I have nomeans of conveying except by exhausting it with words.

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1 “Hold on to your joys, hold on to your pain. / No one knows when the boats will come again. / Love lost can never be regained.” 141