A residual memory.
a fabric of glitches.
The attempt of moment reversal.
a sensation, uninvited, threading itself back through.
Voices in head.

It returns not as image,
but as atmosphere -
thick, unspeakable, textured.

Not nostalgia.
Not recollection.
But a pressure in the air
that knows more than you’re ready to remember.

Cotton aches like skin:
slowly, silently, irreversibly
It absorbs warmth and strain,
holds the grief that simmers just beneath the surface.
Too much heat, and it scars.
Too little, and it disappears -
a moment not fully felt,
memory before it forms.

Negotiation unfolding
between wax and fiber
holding and letting go
An urge to preserve and the inevitability of burn.
Boil. Cool. Crack.
Repeat.

Confronting the instability of memory
Not depicting it,
but to witness it unravel
keep folding into the rupture.

This is not nostalgia for the past,
but grief for the present
as it happens.
A ‘Miholjsko leto’ of the presence:
a strange, golden pause that knows it cannot last.
Warmth that arrives already laced with its own ending.

Repetition becomes a habit of remembering.
Of composing stillness -
where nothing moves,
but everything presses.

Almost trembling.
Delicate structures of hesitation.
A rhythm of nearlys and almosts.
Screaming presence.

Leaving imprint
through pigment, pattern, friction.
Through tiny fractures that map out thought.
Each layer a confrontation.
Each mistake a form of knowing.

There is no clear image.
Only fragments that resemble each other too closely to ignore.
Randomness, not quite random.
Form, barely held together.

Dances of substances.
remembered and reassembled.

​

written by my dear friend Katarina Mladenović.