Past Lover, Are You Still There?
Performance
2025
Yadanar
Can you hear me?
If I speak slowly,
Between the drips,
Between the melting,
Will the sound reach you?
I don’t remember the last thing
I said to you when I left.
Or maybe I remember it wrong.
I almost forgot the times that I had to drive everyone home.
After band practice, after joking, after fighting.
Your mom shouldn’t have to worry.
I’ll wait till you’re inside before I go.
Get home safe.
Come back tomorrow. Please.
And we always did.
Now it’s different.
Now they run home by 4pm.
My bandmates. My fellow musicians. Kids. One of them — he’s only nineteen.
He said he rushes home like I’m running from something I can’t name. There are soldiers at the noodle shop.
I saw brains on the ground.
And I did’t know what to say.
What do you say to someone who’s still living inside the fire?
Past lover, Are you still there?
I want to tell you something.
But my throat is thick with it.
With the guilt.
With the numbness.
Someone told me.
Airports immigration gates getting more strict.
Past lover, Are you still there?
I am.
They’re burning now.
Soft flames.
Then fall apart.
That’s how it goes. Isn’t it?
You said,
You can’t expect me to be normal, when I’ve seen the insides of humans smeared across the sidewalk.
You can’t expect me to write love songs, when every verse feels like an eulogy.
Past lover, Are you still there?
I ask this not to haunt you,
But because I’m haunted.
A friend once told me.
Airplanes are the only thing we can still daydream about home.
Flying to something.
Flying away from something.
The way it suggests arrival.
But always stays out of reach.
That’s Xeno’s paradox, isn’t it?
Every step gets us closer.
But we never arrive.
Always nearly.
Past lovers, Are you still there?
Doesn’t matter.
Because I am.
In Past Lover, Are You Still There?, Yadanar used frozen sunflowers, candlelight, poem and sound to examine the impossibility of returning to a former being or home.
During the performance, candles placed beneath the frozen flowers gradually cause them to thaw and wilt. Their surfaces were painted blue, the colour associated with the new entity imagined across Yadanar’s preceding body of work. She read a poem and drones accompanied before developing into sounds that imitate an aircraft taking off and landing.
The aircraft represents evoking departure, return and the persistent distance from home, while the flowers move from suspended preservation towards irreversible decay. The attempt to revive them through warmth ultimately accelerates their collapse. Through this contradiction, the performance considers how migration transforms one’s relationship to memory.
Diana
My practice begins in the palms of my hands.
Since the beginning, I have been puzzled by the lines on my hands.
They are messy. They form shapes and letters. And I have no capacity to read them. And a part of me do not dare.
Water drops. ရေစက်. In my family and other families like mine, we believe people meet because of droplets of fate we have accumulated through our past lives.
Since the beginning, I have never been young. And I have never been old. I have been here before. I have met everyone here before. In my countless past lives. You have been my fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, pets, lovers, enemies, and healers. I know I remember you. I have kept you somewhere in the catalogues of my mind. You are lost only because my room is messy. And I know you remember me too.
In this life, I find myself again in the place I was before. Again, I was born during the gaps of despair and hope. My parents have force-fed me hope. It stays today as a lump in my throat.
Someday, I will not return here.
My practice ends in the palms of my hands. Things have their own way of coming back to me.
Just like you have come here today.
I put my two palms together. They form a line through me. With these palms I have carried many things with me. Sometimes rice. Sometimes sand. Sometimes blood. Someday, I will wash my hands of them.
Since the beginning, I have been puzzled by the lines on my hands.
They are messy. They form shapes and letters. And I have no capacity to read them. And a part of me do not dare.
Water drops. ရေစက်. In my family and other families like mine, we believe people meet because of droplets of fate we have accumulated through our past lives.
Since the beginning, I have never been young. And I have never been old. I have been here before. I have met everyone here before. In my countless past lives. You have been my fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, pets, lovers, enemies, and healers. I know I remember you. I have kept you somewhere in the catalogues of my mind. You are lost only because my room is messy. And I know you remember me too.
In this life, I find myself again in the place I was before. Again, I was born during the gaps of despair and hope. My parents have force-fed me hope. It stays today as a lump in my throat.
Someday, I will not return here.
My practice ends in the palms of my hands. Things have their own way of coming back to me.
Just like you have come here today.
I put my two palms together. They form a line through me. With these palms I have carried many things with me. Sometimes rice. Sometimes sand. Sometimes blood. Someday, I will wash my hands of them.
6 March 2024
This writing’s true title is Practice. It was a manifesto about my practice as a curator and a decent human being that survived 2021. I lent Practice to be used in an exhibition in 2025 and in a rush, the title was changed to the palm of y/our hands. I found it curious how those who used and abused it never cared to ask me what the writing really meant. Practice feels like an inverted reflection of Yadanar’s Past Lover, Are You Still There?
Two Yangon women of similar privilege, living through the same things, who drove each other home before 6pm after a manicure appointment. We hide our past lovers in our messy bedrooms. We question the old and young lines on our palms. These texts are eulogies. We are both haunted by water drops, by sunflowers, and by scattered organs on pavements. It does not matter. Because we are still there.