If I can truly speak to you, I will do so in my own way: by allowing the void that runs through these conversations, these thoughts, these feelings, to become a space for words. I do not know whether it serves any purpose. I do not know whether there is any sense in trying to give shape to something that, by its very nature, slips away. But in the face of uncertainty, I choose to try. I try to do so by speaking, and even by smiling, while tears hold pain and memory together, as though they were one and the same.
From this fixed point, from that memory that never fades, a twofold attempt emerges: to thank you and, perhaps, to say goodbye. Even though we both know that I will never truly be able to.
Perhaps, then, this is nothing more than an attempt: to hold on to that memory without expecting to resolve it. To give it a tangible form, to draw a boundary around it, not to enclose it, but to remain close to it. To preserve it in the only way your absence has taught me.
Death, when it enters our lives, is never merely an event. It is a force that changes the weight of things. It redraws distances. It transforms what once seemed stable into something fragile, and what once seemed distant into something immediate. Finitude does not arrive with a definition: it comes as a limit, as a subtraction, as a door closing without explanation.
And yet, it is precisely that limit, which can never be fully understood, that forces us to look more closely. To feel more precisely. To discover that certain bonds endure even when there is no longer a physical presence before us. That “not being there” is not the same as nothingness. That absence has a mass, a shadow, a muffled sound.
Grief is not a chapter that comes to an end. It is an inner process that sometimes does not even know it is taking place. It forces us to acknowledge that something is no longer there and, at the very same moment, that it continues to exist as a trace: in habits, in details, in certain sudden returns.
Some losses can be slowly lived through, while others exist outside of time: they remain still, repeat themselves, slip into our days like a fragment that cannot find its place in a sentence. When loss exceeds our capacity to contain it, when it is too sudden, too close, a fracture emerges: not a memory, but a blind spot. Something that returns without ever having truly found a place to belong.
And here, the void is not simply a space left vacant. It is an active space: it weighs upon us, it persists, it demands form. It is not merely a lack: it is a negative presence around which thoughts, images, and silences take shape.
Because sometimes the void does not want to be filled: it wants to be seen.
Perhaps all of this is pointless. But doubt, I am convinced, is an integral part of the process. Without doubt, it is impossible to move towards a goal, whatever that goal may be. And perhaps the goal is not to clarify, not to bring things to a close, not to put a full stop.
For years, I have carried questions to which I cannot give definitive answers: Why am I here, doing what I am doing? Why was it precisely from that day onwards that I felt the need to speak and share what I was feeling? Why, instead, do those feelings remain locked away and trapped when photography falls silent?
Perhaps because some experiences cannot be put into words, and so they seek another way. Perhaps because certain truths cannot be explained. Perhaps because pain does not want to be interpreted.
And even if photography fails, within that failure there is still the trace of an attempt, the trace of a question that refuses every answer.