There’s a mantle in my grandmother’s house - Echo Park, Los Angeles - stacked with photos and fresh fruit. It’s possibly the only place in the world dedicated to my grandfather, who passed away before I was born.
As far as I know, he wasn’t a family man. For a number of years he left L.A. to work and gamble in the Philippines, eventually burning through most of his money.
As a grandfather, I know him mostly through scraps and scattered anecdotes - a peripheral ghost, without real substance.
Growing up, my grandmother’s mantle felt like the projection of a separate, untouchable world -
An alien cryogenesis preserving an equally distant stranger.
Sometimes I thought that if I could just work backwards through that structure,
past mounds of peaches and fading gray portraits,
I could arrive in a place where he was warm and well.
Red Ruins is both an ancestral shrine and a time capsule, built to navigate an unresolved third-culture canon.
Loaded with the way back, it aims itself at a future where the fate of the path, and its cargo, are still uncertain.
