Stranger H: no se recuerda la soledad

Abstract

I sustained a two-hour conversation with a stranger I met in the library. In this time, we cried twice over the death of his parents and my father. We also agreed to create a present for his daughter which kept us in communication for over a year. The synchronic interconnections and parallels of time and space that emerged between this stranger's life and mine forced me into a dialogue with people, dates, places, objects, and revelations that crystallize in this text. The events that initially felt like parts of individual fates of individual family histories are here rediscovered as entanglements of unexpected invisible bonds and strands of cosmic coincidence.  In Stranger H: We Do Not Remember Alone, I recapitulate this process and grieve my loss by gathering mourning rituals, contagious recalling, audiovisual metaphysics, pseudoscientific relational diagrams, and spiritual strangerhood.    The performative nature of the text continued to grow. I shared this text with a friend and she spontaneously added the memories of her own loss as they emerged while going through it. As I read her notes, I realized that things that we probably wouldn’t have been able to tell each other verbally were shared in a profound reading-conversation. The editable version of the text is now available on request to anyone who has lost a parent and would like to join this conversation. This text has become an in-dialogue reading that acknowledges loss from an aesthetic, philosophical, speculative, and imaginative lense. But most importantly, it is a way to be accompanied in the lonesome process of facing loss. Although the pain of each person is non-transferable and must be overcome individually, the Stranger H: We Do Not Remember Alone holds space and time to reflect one's own experience in the mirror of voices of many others. If you wish to have access to the editable version contact the.stranger.gets.a.gift@gmail.com