Scoop
On Land*
Mónica de Miranda

The sun blinds me. I can't see anything. I am a living being with only one life, and so until I die, I want to be born.

Come to think of it, we are always in between worlds. The border is the path we continue to walk along and it’s daring us to cross. I no longer feel the crossing with my feet, but in the air I breathe, which enters me and then leaves.

The air sculpts the earth, the ground, the space that I walk on. It indicates a direction to me and the force that drives the prow. Under my feet I have a whole world which I walk upon. The sound of the wind accompanies me and with it I feel the steps, the passing of the days and nights.

It is the last drops of sunlight that open the darkness, flowing between the line of the sea and the expansion of time. I arrive at you with the heaviness that is Europe. I seem to have been born on the other side of history, but I don't know how to talk about this, because now that I have crossed the shadows, they appear there. The north is a shadow, and I am an upside down place, turned towards you. I walk to the place you will leave behind, and I leave the place that I should arrive.

I didn't choose where I was born. I want to choose where I will die. I don't want to be like the sun that rises and falls in the same place. Here the body has no address. Do I lose my north? I want to walk alive through another place where my body can breathe, even if without life.

I walk south, where I belong and I learn to walk again, every day. And I follow a new light. Europe does not belong to me.The sound of the wind is my home. Wherever I go, it makes me feel that I am arriving. It travels in different spaces and times. It roams the past and the future without being present. When we reach it, it is no longer present. It has dispersed.

Could an immigrant really silence the melody of their own language? They say that silence is what makes the music. But that would be like playing without instruments, like some unknown sound. It takes years of oblivion for a stranger to breathe in salt water and say that this is now his home.

[...]

3*. Transcript from the film ‘The Sun does not Rise in the North’ (2023) by Mónica de Miranda.