There is something I find hard to admit, although by now I do not have too many reservations about saying it: I remember almost nothing of my childhood. Not in a normal way, at least. I have loose images, disconnected fragments, scenes floating without context as if they belonged to the life of another person I know only superficially. I remember facts, data, approximate chronologies. But I do not remember the emotions, which is, well, the normal part.

For a long time I thought this was common, that memory worked like that for everyone: blurry, capricious, selective. Later I began to understand that not entirely. That there are people who remember the smell of their grandmother's kitchen with an almost physical sharpness, who can close their eyes and be seven years old again in the schoolyard, who carry inside them a collection of vivid, emotionally charged moments that define them. I do not have any of that. I suspect it has quite a lot to do with neurodivergence, with how some brains process experience differently, filing away the affective part badly, discarding what others would consider essential to keep.

For years I did not think much about it. But at some point I began to take photographs, and something clicked.

In Japanese there is an expression with no exact translation: mono no aware (物の哀れ). It is usually translated as "the melancholy of the ephemeral," although I am told that does not fully capture the weight of the original. It is the emotion you feel when you contemplate something beautiful knowing it will disappear. The cherry blossom that lasts a week. The last ray of light before night falls. The face of someone you love in a moment you already feel is leaving. It is not exactly sadness. It is something more complex: a kind of love sharpened by the awareness of loss.

The Japanese built an entire aesthetic around that idea. Without knowing it, I was building a photographic practice around it.

When I take a photograph I am not trying to make art, although sometimes something resembling it comes out. I am trying to make memory. I am turning an instant into an object I can revisit later. It is a desperate and useless act: the light changes, the moment is gone, the photograph is not the memory but only its shadow. But it is the only shadow I am going to have.

There is something deeply Buddhist in all this, where impermanence is not a tragedy to be overcome, but the fundamental condition of existence. Everything we love is already leaving at the moment we love it. Photography does not deny that. On the contrary: it accepts it and celebrates it in its own way. Each photograph is a small surrender. This existed, it was real, I was there even if later I do not remember it.