Etched in the Quiet

I spent this morning tracing the spine of an old book I found in a thrift store. It was filled with notes in the margins, written in a handwriting I didn’t recognize. Someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s favorite lines, left behind for me to find years later. It made me think about how we all leave these little trails behind us. We carve our names into things, we leave our marks on walls or in the memories of people we pass on the street, hoping that something of us stays behind when we are gone. It is a strange, quiet kind of immortality. We want to be remembered, not for the grand things we did, but for the simple fact that we were here, that we existed, and that we mattered to someone. Does it ever worry you, the idea that our marks might eventually fade, or do you find comfort in the thought that we are all part of a much larger, ongoing story?

Zahraa Al Hassani has captured this feeling perfectly in her image titled Immortal Names. She reminds us that even in cold stone, there is a pulse of life that refuses to be forgotten. What names or stories come to your mind when you look at this?