Dear Aaron,

Thank you for your question. It touches something ancient and alive within me. Everything can be taken from me: my name, my freedom, my possessions - but never my childhood. My childhood is my black passport, my silent proof of origin.

Even if they locked me in a room with no sound, I would still hold that passport - that kingdom of memory.

He who remembers his childhood lives a thousand lives before this one. And of those thousand, one burns brightest. A memory so absurd, so formative, that it reshaped the core of who I am.

The summer of the Kiwi Operation.

I was a child, wild with friendship. His name was Fons, my mirror, my co-conspirator. We were blood brothers, pressing our wounds together, crossing our urine streams as sacred mischief, building our own cosmos from mud and laughter.

That summer, we went to the Ardennes. Four mothers, one father, one stepfather, eight children. A convoy of young parents and growing bodies.

Our mothers invented a game, a secret mission. They called it the Kiwi Operation, a blend of Kim and Wim, Fons’s father and my stepfather.

At first it was just a joke. Until it wasn’t.

It began at breakfast. The shower was running too long. The beds were empty. A note lay on the duvet: They’ve been taken.

Our mothers’ fear looked real. Too real. Something in us believed. We ran into the woods, a caravan of eight trembling bodies.

Everywhere, clues: a torn flip-flop, a ripped T-shirt, a drop of blood on a leaf. We followed the trail deeper into the dark.

Then we saw clothes tied to trees. Our fathers’ pants were swaying like warnings. Fons began to shake. So did I. My mother grabbed my arm. Her eyes were glass. She whispered, Quiet.

And then I saw them - five men on horseback, black against the light.

“They took your stepfather,” she said.

I believed her. Entirely.

High in the trees, the last fragments of clothing hung like flags of defeat. Then we reached the climax of the game. Wim and Kim were half-naked, tied to a tree, surrounded by five forest rangers.

They saw panic. Children crying. Men stripped. Blood on one child’s leg. Everything looked wrong.

Kim stepped forward, his voice breaking. C’est pour les enfants!

A silence fell.

Pour les enfants...

To the rangers, it wasn’t an explanation. It was an accusation turned inside out. What to us was play, to them was a crime. The logic of the game collapsed completely.

And we, the children, betrayed in our holiest realm - our imagination - turned against the parents.

We went on strike. We refused to speak. Not because they had played a game, but because they had played upon our truth.

Back home, my real father raged at my mother. He said the trip had turned me feral, traumatized beyond repair. And in a way, he was right. But something was born that summer.

The Kiwi Operation marked the moment when innocence gave way to awareness, and imagination learned to survive.

In the end, the Kiwi Operation never ended.

It lives on in every game I play too seriously. In every truth I half-believe.

It lives on in the way I look at the world - as if it could, at any moment, turn back into a story and take me with it.

With love,
Coma

This Picture was took in Bronx, New York.

I photographed them 16 years after the Kiwi Operation, but in their gaze I recognised the same raw intelligence of play -  that serious form of imagination unique to childhood.

Different geographies, same condition: the child as inventor of worlds, believing completely until disbelief arrives.

Memory, I realised, is a global language. It repeats itself in new faces, under different skies.