“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
It is strange, to walk here in Florence, to run my fingers along walls where many have run theirs through before: merchants selling wares, children in playful glee, believers in sombre and gay processions alike, lovers in their passion. Surely in all these years there is one who must have cried in heartbreak by this towering Duomo, one must have looked at the panorama of the city, engulfed by it. Or to wonder what warm bodies, through history, have sat on Ponte Vecchio, and like me, been graced with a burst of colour as the sun reluctantly sets.
It is strange wondering these wonderings, because it seems to me that all these feelings that must have been felt – walking these streets, between these edifices, and paintings and sculpted doors and carved walls and statues – all these thoughts, belonging to stories that have been written as well as erased, that have been remembered as well as forgotten; that all these feelings run through me; that by simply walking along San Lorenzo, or sitting on atop a wall close to Fiesole with the city at my feet, or flailing on my bike – that I have touched time.
It’s made me think of home too / will, say, someone who crosses the Gondo river that’s I swam in as a child where no bridge as ancient as Ponte Vecchio still spans it, feel my history? Will they feel my excitement when I dived there with Winnie, or my horror when it almost carried me away? Will they know that we planted ndumas[1] in batches along its banks? / Where do memories lie? Where do they go when we who carry them are gone? What remembrance lies beyond what the ear hears, what the eyes see, what the senses feel?
What then, if Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo and Dante and Da Vinci and Brunelleschi and all who Florentine history remembers fondly; what then of memories beyond them?
[1] Arrowroot