“No one loses the past or the future, for no one can take from them what they do not have. Remember that all things revolve and return along the same orbits, and that for the observer it is the same to see them for a century, or two, or for all eternity.” (Meditations, 14).

A quote from Jorge Luis Borges, who in turn quotes Marcus Aurelius, in his essay The Circular Time.

I hope you’ll forgive me for starting this little post with a quote. In general, I’m not one to flaunt my knowledge—which I have only in very small doses—but the idea of circular time, of searching for the past (perfect or imperfect), of gliding between timelines, has been a constant in my writing and in my life.

In any case, I’m not about to throw an academic essay at you or anything growing in that scholarly lawn. On the contrary, I’m going to talk about my shopping sprees on Etsy. My Etsession, which has roots in the past: a compulsion to recreate things I have owned, even if the originals are still alive and well.

For several years now, I’ve been obsessed with buying furniture and decorative pieces as close as possible to the ones we had (or have) in Cuba. It’s not about replacing something I lost because the apartment, its furniture and my mother, are all still in Havana, but about somehow bringing the past into the present.

In this photo, taken in December 1995 (my last Christmas in Havana), I am in our living room near a statue named Graziella.

I searched Etsy until I found a similar one, though I’m still looking for an even closer match.

Here I am with my grandma Topeo in another living room area, in 2000.

I found an almost identical vase, only that the one we have at home is blue and the one I got is light brown, but they are exactly the same style. According to the seller, they’re from the 1930s. And I also found a nude statue, reminiscent of the one my grandma bought many years ago.

Ah, but I go even further back. Remember my post Toys of Yesteryear? When I found the Steiff dog “Snobby,” it felt like bringing home a lost friend.

Here I am with him at eight years old—

And now at fifty-eight:

The fact that I keep looking for these reminders of the past may have something to do with a novel I am working on. It is set in La Manzana de Gómez, the building where the middle school where I studied from 1977 to 1980 was located. It’s part of my Havana Mystery series, and I’m both protagonist and detective. Writing it has been great fun…and it has also plunged me headfirst into the tense we call pretérito in Spanish. (For the record, we have two past tenses.) In the photo at the beginning of the post, I am the same age as my character, Teresita: fourteen years old.

Ultimately, though, I don’t know why I’m still searching for pieces of yesterday. It’s not quite about returning to the past. Perhaps it’s just about holding on to time, which keeps slipping, relentlessly, through my fingers.