I knew right away that I must not move the box set and its letters. The reasons for this certainty took time to rise to my awareness.

There was, first, the state of the box: worm-eaten in winter, dusty in summer. I knew it was inhabited both by tiny mosses or fungi when the weather turned cold and damp, and by insects when heat and dryness returned. A few moths had also begun to attack the fabric. An oily substance had seeped through the lid and affected all the envelopes on the left side of the box, making the paper translucent, with some letters written on both sides.

Beyond the fragility of the box, I think I was also afraid, somehow, of the city’s imagined toxicity, after it had declared this cellar infected and condemned the entire building. I very clearly, very physically, wanted to connect myself to these writings, but perhaps I also wanted to protect them from an uncertain circulation, for them and for the island’s inhabitants. Sometimes, a label of toxicity, even an unjustified one, is a call to care, to deep listening, to intimacy, rather than forcing them into exposure.

This respect for what is intimate also brought me into a relationship of sacredness. This place has been so violated. This place as a sanctuary of poetry. This island and this archipelago of many crossings paths has been so violently, colonized , owned , taken and riped appart. I do not want to take anymore, to appropriate. I want to contemplate, and if it rings true, to become a channel, a passage, a messenger.

And then I think I found there an excuse, a practice, a secret and ritualized reason to visit La passe every night, when the guards rested in their heated truck. I would slip in through the back door, the one by the abandoned garden, oil the hinges so they would no longer squeak, pass through the old kitchen, climb the steps to go breathe and water the day jasmines and the night jasmines, greet the forgotten books—by Gaston Miron, Patrice Desbiens and Rejean Descharmes, and Louis Riel, Louky Bersianik and Nicole Brossard..Among the freshers covers: La filée. Islands of decolonial love. From the close universe to the infinite world. To feel accompanied; not completely, but rooted; in a history not yet constellating enough, but already winding and searching for more diversified soils, basements, water tables, buried streams, attentive stars.

I always love to admire the bathroom full of mirrors, getting dusty. all this in the dark, not turning any light, exept the litgle blue light, i would bring downstairs, which does not reflect like the others on the walls and does not pass through the windows covered in ivy. To put a new N1 mask on my face. To breathe deeply and feel its relative tightness. To go down to the cellar. To settle in with a thermos of black tea, a small stool, gloves, a blanket, and the headlamp.

I discovered that I could write in white, on black paper, with very little blue light. I wanted to come back. Again and again. Patiently. To love the abandoned house. To water the plants and drink in these strange stories, washed up here, or hidden here.

I think the last reason that pushed me not to move the stories was imagining that this was a deposit—agreed upon, expected—and that a chosen person, or someone who had been warned, would come back to retrieve them when the conditions were met. I never knew whether I was the awaited person, or whether there was someone else, more legitimate. Copying these stories by hand, one by one, would give me time to feel out the meanders of that question, the possibilities of usurpation or of the rightness of my gesture. Night after night, page after page, for two and a half years.

During that period, I discovered something strange. Each recorded story would reach my subconscious somewhere and would influence—indeed, structure—some of my dreams. When I woke, I knew very clearly which dreams emanated from the stories in the box and which were mine alone. It is as if, little by little, I was invited into a collective experience, a world of heightened sensitivities, in which it was not easy to act, or at least, not for me.

Perhaps I was invited as a witness? A witness to what? For whom, and why? What should be done with these dreams when they are both lucid and immobilizing? When we have no place, no mouth, no ears for sharing? How can we sort out what belongs to our dreams and our visions, to our personal affairs, and what concerns the collective body?

In his book the chosen child, Galsan Tchinag shares all the subtlety of a Tsua tradition (in Mongolia). Personal dreams must not be shared, but whispered into the hollow of a stone, unless it is a vision of importance for the group’s future, something that must absolutely be shared.

How to know, what not to share, from what to share, and how. Such a question