“How tenderly this little light would have been sheltered. But on the borders of the West the breath of civilization has extinguished it before it burned,” she writes (Ohanian, p.234)

Վերջապես, հասնել ես (finally, you have arrived)

Floating across the belly of a starless sky, I hear Boym’s (2001) cautionary words fade in from a whisper, “Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim - or its next victimizer” (p.). It is true that I have been tempted to climb the walls of this maze in order to get a better vantage point; especially when my path has shared a wall with the center of the elusive warren. I was under the impression that the ‘center’ is where my burning questions reside, that they were one with the most essential of answers. I am soon reminded that this is not a maze. It is a spiral, as I named it so in the beginning of this work. In what seems to be the pit of this spiral, it is dark yet I am not lost, and in my hands I hold but a fragment of my so-called-past. It is ‘so-called’ because I am also one with it, and we are both timeless. Together we are woven reed, the warp and the weft. Together we are re-fragmented, and in the eye of the storm, in what feels like a calmer place than the spiraling chaos of my prior approach -- I am able to dialogue with the flesh that the skirt accompanied, and the woman who wore it.

"Oh God ! O Heaven !
O Christ ! Why is Thy curse laid on me? Why hast thou led me forth from my country, from Thine own Eden?"
Armen Ohanian (1918)