What Sticks¶
Sitting on the cold toilet seat, my hazel eyes barely open up, but I discover, within the thousands of trays of stickers I collect in my bathroom, the sticker once found in a café bench, in 2025. This was 20 years ago, unbearable how time slips by, I shiver. That feeling is colder than the tiles beneath my bare feet. The notion of time is reflected through stickers, stamps and stencils building up on these walls, creating a daily archive almost invisible. But this one sticker. Holographic. Incredibly simple, holds a memory I would rather forget. Although scratching it would be even more painful. Sadder even.
The light shifts. Morning in Bucharest or morning in memory. Does it matter? Yiayia used to say Greeks measure time in coffee grounds, in the patterns left behind. I measure it in adhesive. Each city leaves its residue: the Kafka Museum ticket stub from Prague layered over the Kraków tram transfer, the Berlin club stamp bleeding into yesterday’s grocery receipt from the Chinese place on Calea Victoriei.
But this one. 2025. I was twelve.
The café was in Thessaloniki… — no, Sofia — no… Memory stutters… The borders were already dissolving then, the first wave of climate migrations, my parents arguing in the kitchen about whether to stay, to go, whether roots meant anything when the ground kept shifting. I’d peeled the holographic square from the bench’s underside, its rainbow shimmer promising something. What? Permanence? Proof of having been somewhere? I press my thumb against it now. It doesn’t yield.
My phone lights up with the message — Coffee? Three hundred kilometers away, but what’s distance? We’re all ghosts in each other’s phones, haunting time zones, demanding presence without proximity. I don’t answer. The sticker refracts light into spectrum, each angle revealing different colors, different selves. The child who believed in staying. The adolescent who learned to leave. The adult who can’t tell the difference.
My grandmother once told me that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but what about the stories we stick to walls, layer upon layer, until the original surface disappears completely? What if forgetting isn’t failure but architecture?
I stand, one year after Saturn’s return, knees cracking. The bathroom mirror reflects a person assembled from elsewhere: yiayia’s eyes, Athens in my jawline, Warsaw in my posture, the particular exhaustion of belonging nowhere completely. The walls pulse with evidence, not of where I’ve been, but of the frantic need to prove I was there at all.
The holographic sticker catches morning light. For one moment, it shows me twelve again, believing geography was destiny, that peeling something from one place and adhering it to another meant you’d captured something true. For another moment, it shows me now, recognizing the violence of preservation, how every sticker covers the wall beneath, how remembering is also erasure.
I could scrape it off. I could layer something new over it. I could photograph it and dissolve the archive into cloud storage, make memory weightless, portable, infinitely replicable and therefore meaningless.
Instead, I leave it. Let it shimmer. Let it refract. Let it hold what I can’t — the simultaneity of presence and absence, as I become a person standing barefoot on cold tile at dawn, shivering not from temperature but from the terrible knowledge that everything that proves we existed also proves we left.
— Ivan, Madlen and AI