Your head dreams memories,
takes planes that land years before taking off,
walks through streets that suddenly intersect in the middle of silence
or stands before an unknown place
and puts a kept in memory set design on it.

Your head jumps like magicians do
when hiding and then showing up.
Sometimes it gets lost in gaps and breathes
as if smoothly sliding his hands
over dusty traces on the furniture.
Hides its street name and wakes up
in a mall with no name.
Sometimes it makes time narrow
so you can jump to the distant place on life
where ask your mother for
chocolate with almonds again.

Your head is full of mazes,
crossing places and years,
comes out and comes in,
hits a wall or gets into a train or enters a hospital.

Changes the faces facades,
does tricks with letter and photos
letting whole lifetime memories
be felt together, all at once.

Montse Lopez Muley Abdhalha
(MUSSIA)

Translator’s note: original poem written in Spanish. Translated with the sole purpose of conveying its general meaning.

Little did I knew about this disease, beyond the topic of memory loss. Unfortunately, some relatives of both Joan Pocurull and Montse López Mulley, members of Mussia, have suffered Alzheimer and explained how it affects people; It not only consists of memory loss, but it is much closer to a mixture and disorder of memories. No matter how little you think about it: that means chaos. Imagine a mixture of ten memories and, at the same time, disorder them in time. That implies the absolute inconsistency of your past. Loss of references and access to the labyrinth. As a fragment of the poem wonderfully explains, you can go from «normal» to finding yourself completely lost in a moment. For example, you walk down a familiar street and, all of a sudden, it fades from your memory and you don’t know where you are. Scary.

         One of the first ideas that I was able to assess was the image of a labyrinth, although, finally, I thought a memory “mixer” fit much better in the chaotic essence of such ailment.

      Childhood memories are the most resistant. We refer to smells, places, etc; childhood experiences seem more deeply recorded, they are more difficult to alter when suffering Alzheimer. At the very least, a tiny poetic truce in this terrible world of intermittent chaos.

                                                                                                Jordi Roca Zanuy