Nouvelle finaliste du Prix Energheia France 2023

It’s eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, I’m slightly hungover. Flashes of last night gather in my head like a swarm, so I pick up my laptop, and I type the night away and the chaos of the swarm progressively becomes calm. Why do I write? It sounds like a choice if we phrase it like that. I feel like the words write me and not the other way around. I am a vessel, a vehicle of my abstract emotions that carry me away, almost too fast, too hectic, they fly away too fast to remember in this multitude of feelings that we call life. And I am too scared; too scared to forget them, to lose those memories, and with them, who I am, and who I was, and with them, the key to whom I will be, of whom I can become. They say photography is the art of painting with light. They. Who? Some ancient civilizations, or some 19th-century intellectuals… I don’t know, I read it somewhere… but light can’t capture the flow of thoughts flowing through my brain, through my beats, in between breaths. I would need a lens from a different dimension, one that no one has reached yet. And so I write.

It’s like painting a picture of my emotions, of the abstract self that light can’t capture. A picture of the suffering from a broken heart, a snap of an optimistic 18-year-old self, and here is another one of my first existential crises. Do you see all of them? Can you read all the colors? And if you put them together, you see, it’s like a huge puzzle. Can you see the collage they make? Yes. I know. One would say it looks like my face.