Somewhere Less Than Heaven

Where do our memories go when we are not remembering them? Do they linger somewhere, just beneath the surface, waiting for the next thing to stir them back to life? Or do they dissolve entirely, falling away until something - some scent, some sound, the way light hits a certain street corner - pulls them back into form?

I have often imagined memory as a place, an inner landscape shaped by the things we have seen and felt, the things we have lost. It is not fixed but shifting, a terrain made of fragments, half-built structures, and disappearing pathways. Somewhere between the conscious and the forgotten, memory lays dormant - its details softening, folding into itself like mist. But it is never truly gone. It waits.

When I think of Malta, I am not thinking of a real place, but of the one that lives inside my mind. The childhood summers with my grandparents, the heat rising off the stone, the scent of seawater carried in on the wind. The feeling of being held in something familiar. Yet, when I try to grasp it, the image shifts, the outlines blur. Some details return vividly - the cold tiles of a hotel lobby, the weight of the sun pressing on my skin - while others have eroded, leaving only an impression. And then there are the memories I am certain of, but which feel like fiction, reconstructed over time, shaped more by longing than by truth.

I returned to Malta, thinking that the place itself might unlock something, that walking the same streets, standing in the same light, would bring me back to what I had lost. But the past is not something you can step into. Every new experience layered itself over the old ones, thinning them out, altering them. The place I was looking for no longer existed - perhaps it never had.

Memory is not a vault. It is more like a tide, moving in and out, shaping the landscape only to undo it again. It exists in this liminal state, between presence and absence, reality and dream. I search for something solid, something to hold onto, but find only traces - moments that flare up briefly before sinking back down. What remains are feelings more than facts: the warmth of an embrace, the quiet weight of nostalgia, the longing to return to something that was never truly there.

And yet, I collect. Not to recover the past, but to carve out a space where memory can live - always dissolving, always just beyond reach.

Thomas Martin was part of Face-to-Face: Arles Edition 2024.