Archeology: Digging For Remnants of Memories

Existence and the Individual: What does it mean for an individual to exist, and how does

individual existence relate to the broader fabric of being? Consider different philosophical

perspectives on subjectivity, consciousness, and our place in the universe.

In and out– in and out– 

breathe, 

in, and out. 

I cannot feel the splinters penetrating the epidermis of my skin, nor the weight of the large wooden shovel I'm carrying. I do not know what city I am in, nor whether the sun has risen or fallen. I only feel the weight of guilt on my shoulders, and my body slowly giving out. I keep going, though. I have to keep going. 

“Dig!” A voice in me shouts. Digging has become far too familiar in my routine. I have to continue to dig a grave for my brothers and sisters that have fallen, to dig for the sense of humanity that has disappeared for far too long, to dig– to find my sanity. 

January 28th 1943 

I wake up in a mysterious room, filled with a mixture of bright and blue tulips. I've never seen it before, yet it sparks an emotion in myself— nostalgia. 

The room is impossibly quiet. No screaming. No cries. The silence is honestly deafening. As I rise to my feet, though I don't quite remember lying down, the air tastes like static, sharp and sterile. Too sterile. My hands are clean. Too clean. To my surprise there is no cold. No watchtower. No screaming kapo. Only tulips. A sea of them. They stretch past the corners of the room, to unimaginable lengths, swaying gently despite the still air. 

A voice behind me murmurs: 

“You remembered.” 

I'm careful with my footwork as I shift my gaze. No one is there. Only a mirror. Cracked and old. Yet when I look into it, I do not see myself. I see a child. My younger brother. His eyes are bright — his mouth is covered in soot. He is mouthing something. Leaning in, he whispers: “Don’t forget us. ”And then he vanishes, like smoke blown through broken glass. 

The tulips begin to decay. One by one, their colors darken — red bleeding into black, blue fading into ash-grey. The room seems to pulse. I blink, and the shovel is in my hands again. But this is no longer dirt I dig into. It's “memory.” Soft, wet, and deep. Every stroke of the shovel brings up pieces: a burnt doll, a photograph torn in half, a boot with no foot in it. A violin string. A broken pair of glasses. 

Then, a voice. A man. Not quite real, yet more alive than I’ve felt in years. “Why did you leave me in the fire?” he asks.

I drop the shovel. My throat tightens. “I tried. I—I tried to go back. They had guns. They had no mercy. They—” 

“They burned me,” he says calmly, cutting off my stutter. 

“But you’re the one who buried me.” 

A silence follows, heavier than earth. 

Then– 

“Dig. Not for graves — for names.” 

I look down. My shovel is no longer a shovel. It’s a quill. And the ground is a scroll, endless and white. The tulips suddenly begin to bloom. 

The scroll stretches infinitely beneath my feet. A vast plain of white parchment. The tulips sway gently at the edges of this new terrain, but I sense they do not belong here. Not anymore. They are memories dressed as flowers — illusions given form by my aching mind. 

I kneel down. The quill trembles in my hand like a living thing. I do not know what I am supposed to write. There are no words grand enough for what I have seen, what I have done. But the silence demands I try. 

So I begin with a name: 

Eliezer. 

My best friend in the Vilna Ghetto. We stole bread together, we laughed in hushed whispers after curfew. He died in a cattle car, crushed between bodies that once sang lullabies to children. 

The ink bleeds slowly onto the scroll. As it does, a figure rises from the parchment — not flesh, not shadow, but presence. He doesn’t look at me. He looks up, at something beyond the blank sky. 

Then he fades. 

Another name: 

Miriam.

She was six. Her mother hid her in the stove when the soldiers came. I never saw either of them again. More ink. More presence. More silence. I keep writing. And as I do, I begin to wonder: 

Is this existence? 

Is this what it means to be — to be remembered? 

To be named, to be mourned, to be drawn back into the fabric of consciousness through memory and grief? 

A voice answers, though no mouth softly speaks: “To be forgotten is to die twice.” I pause. “But were they ever real,” I whisper, “if they only exist now in my mind?” And that’s when the sky cracks. 

A single fracture — like shattered glass. A line that splits the heavens. 

From the crack drips sound. Distant, echoing voices. Debates. Whispers. Philosophers speaking through time: 

“Cogito, ergo sum,” says Descartes. 

“You are thought — not body.”

“You are a sensation,” says Husserl. 

“You are an experience — but only yours.”

“You are meat,” says the Materialist.

“A nervous system tricked by patterns.”

“You are spark,” says the Dualist. 

“A soul, eternal, wearing a mask of flesh.” 

“You are all,” says the Panpsychist. 

“Even the tulip feels.” 

And then, louder — a child’s voice: 

“If I feel sadness… does that mean I exist?” 

I fell to my knees. My own voice is a whisper now: “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” 

Around me, the names I’ve written begin to glow. They rise — not as people, but as stars. Tiny suns of memory and grief. Each one a self, a story. Each one individual — yet now part of a vast constellation beyond me. 

And I understand something, briefly, painfully: 

Perhaps the individual is a ripple in the ocean of “Being.” 

Not separate, not permanent — but meaningful only because it moves. 

And perhaps to exist… is not simply to breathe or think — but to be witnessed, to be mourned, to be loved. The sky fractures again. A blinding light pours through. I shield my eyes. And then I hear my brother’s voice, the one I thought was lost in Treblinka: “Keep writing. We only vanish when you stop.” 

Eli and I walk across a field where flowers breathe and silence speaks. Each step leaves no footprint, yet the world shifts with our passing. 

This place, I begin to understand, is not punishment. It is not salvation either. It is the residue of being.  A space where consciousness clings to the edge of nonexistence, flickering like flame on soaked wood — not enough to burn, too stubborn to die. 

I fall to my knees beside a boy with a violin for a spine. 

“Why me?” I ask. 

Eli kneels with me. “Because you remembered.” 

That word — remembered — unspools something in me. 

All this time, I thought my body was the anchor to the world. But maybe it was the remembering that kept me alive. Maybe existence is not about flesh — but about witness. 

To exist, then, is not merely to breathe or to think. 

It is to carry. 

To bear unbearable truths and still find space for a single fragile tulip to grow in your ribcage. 

We reach a clearing. 

There’s a mirror made of pooled water — still, silver, ancient. Eli gestures.

I carefully look in 

I do not see myself. 

I see thousands. A kaleidoscope of eyes and bone and breath — survivors, victims, fighters, mothers, strangers. Some wear stars on their chests. Others hold books, shovels, violins, fists. They shimmer in and out, like waves in a sea of memory. I realize: 

I was never just one. 

I was the many — glimpsed through the keyhole of a single life. 

We are all fragments braided together in the same infinite tapestry — our thoughts, our aches, our joys humming in one great, trembling chord. 

And maybe that is the cruel and beautiful paradox: 

The individual exists only as part of everything else. 

A heartbeat that echoes in the canyon of all beings. 

A single cry that becomes a chorus. 

The mirror ripples. The flowers dim. 

A voice softens: “You’ve given enough shape to the forgotten. You can rest.” I close my eyes, resting. My breath is soft, yet heavy. 

In and out– in and out– 

breathe, 

in, and out.

.