The Archive of Ancestral Flesh

And on doing what you're "supposed" to do

I feel my grandfather in my body.

I don’t know how this works, exactly, or why it would be like this. Thanks to the centuries-long war on remembering which ravaged the collective memories first of Europeans and then of all others, there’s no clear guide on this. No voices of the past speak of this process, no sage words inscribed and preserved to explain to those — us —who came later why the dead persist this way, nor what they want.

We are war orphans, you and I, displaced from lands and their stories, cleared out from enclosed traditions, lost refugees seeking home in cultures just as lost as we.

The older I get, the more I feel my grandfather. Sometimes, I see him in the mirror and say “hey,” though I’d never said that to him when he lived. He would have said “hi,” and called me “mister,” as he always did, and smiled with strangely-young eyes despite his aging body.