Recently my mom had a dream about her friend who died. I think I met him a few times, but I remember only one time when we visited his house by the river where beavers live. We were supposed to watch these beavers but I don’t remember anything except a shelf hanging in his living room. It was made to house small figurines, each one of them in a single compartment. So they all lived together but each had their own space.
I was nagging my parents to buy me the same shelf for all my figurines that were cramped together on one floor in a regular cabinet. It seems like everybody has forgotten about this desire of mine because I never got the shelf. I didn’t think about it while growing up, slowly reducing my collection, packing it into boxes, and letting it disappear.
When my mom was recounting the dream to me, the image of the shelf came back so I started to think about my figurines lying in the dark. The shelf would have been a perfect house for them, but sadly they have never got it.
I keep them among other things in labeled boxes, together with the past written down in notebooks piling one on top of the other. At some point, I had jotted down the names of all the people I had met, but I lost the ability to keep up. So now I try to remember to let them go, though usually I don’t. I think that I make things up, but they have probably always been inside my collection of boxes. Thinking about that shelf again, I realize that art comes from that old desire to display the small stories the figurines held, the stories I have found. I strive to place them where I imagine they belong.
