sleep in the shoes before you wear them.

Strong fragrance of lilies fills the space of the room. It is more tangible than my own presence. Being here makes little sense and bears no relation to where I was a year ago. Or a week ago. The radical tectonic displacement makes it difficult to sustain the idea of a single person. And what if one is not a single person?

When one travels, the speed of movement and the temporal proximity of departure and arrival that belie the distance in space, are at the source of the sensation that the journey gains upon one's own thoughts and feelings. Because one feels "the same" (Rousseau), the question arises, quite simple, perhaps a simpleton's question: "what is the difference between 'here' and 'there'?" Since "I" experience myself as the same, can anyone guarantee that my location has, indeed, changed? The question is quickly tailed by a suspicion: "if the place is different, perhaps so am I?" As soon as I manage to convince myself that the journey was real, that I traveled considerable distance, I begin to feel my way around that alterity which germinated within me, all by itself, and which, as if with a sharp blade, separates me from that other self that must have stayed behind. The other, with her feelings, and thoughts, and memories of the other place. Here, I cannot remember anything at all. I am empty. The journey has produced a doubling of the self; I no longer feel "the same":  instead, I am filled with ghost memories whose intensity and coloration remain, here, inaccessible.

When I travel to places where I once lived, my memories revive (Proust). Their re-emergence is not necessarily a source of joy because, despite their vividness to the point of repetition, the possibilities of the past moment had been sealed off.

Curiously, this experience brings to mind an image from one of those shows I watch when I'm too tired after work to do anything else: a sci-fi series Fringe. There are two parallel and nearly identical worlds which, through some portals, come from time to time in contact with each other. However, according to the laws of physics, they can never coexist in the same space and time. A 'space-quake' occurs, causing the two worlds to overlap. A catastrophe: the molecules of a building and all its contents, from one and the other world, collide and interpenetrate. All this lasts a few seconds. When the matter solidifies, the floors of the building are covered with corpses of "monsters": people with two heads and no arms, people with several limbs, etc. There is one survivor: a man impaled by a supporting pillar. Although he appears dead, he is still crying for help. The FBI agents lift up his shirt and discover another face, that of his double from the other world, calling for his wife from the other world (for in this one, he was unmarried).

This sudden coexistence of two parallel beings belonging to two separate worlds seems as impossible as co-presence of memories from two different places from both ends of a journey. One looks in the mirror and ends up resigning oneself to the commonplace conviction that, because one still looks the same, one is the same person.

Why not hold on to the reality of forgetting, to the feeling of having left a part of oneself elsewhere, with or without the possibility of returning to it? Stronger than the sameness of my person is the reality of multiple ruptures, breaks within that illusory solidity of the self.