Writing

INSIDE THE BOOK

Foreword

This book began, as most things do, in the body.

The texts gathered here were written over several years, in different states of knowing and not knowing, in and alongside therapeutic, artistic, and spiritual work. They were published first as essays on a blog, offered as a way of making sense of me, my family, and why the pain.

Now, after some revisiting, they come together in a different form, not as a linear memoir, but as a spiral. A spiral does not progress; it returns. Each turn covers the same ground as the last, but from another distance and with a different light. The texts here work the same way. They circle the same territory: the body as an archive, the family as a system of transmission, the persistence and porosity of ancestral memory.

Each return reveals the same song with a new melody.

The map at the end of this book indicates a possible shape of the journey. You can enter at the centre with a poem, with a heart divided across geographies, and move outward, text by text, turn by turn, until you reach the edge, where the spiral opens into the same ground.

The essays, poems, letters, and fragments of research are prayers to motherhood, migration, illness, exile, abandonment, and the slow work of repair through the body and the soul.

Here, you will meet Ghosts, Monsters, and Healers, sometimes inside the same person. You will move between hospital rooms and apartments, between Paris, Athens, and other places, between childhood memories and amnesia that have blurred my sense of reality.

This book is an attempt to listen to my body, to my child, to the mothers and grandmothers and others whose lives still move through me. I do not claim to redeem any truth of any story here. Much remains fragmented, contradictory, and incomplete.

Memory does not come back easily: it often withdraws in waves, flows back in a sack of mud, and each new question buries the answers in small mounds of sand that the tide will bypass going down.