PETER C. O’HARA-DIAZ

Water never returns an exact reflection. It receives what stands before it, ripples it, reconstitutes it, and gives it back transformed—something close to the original but not quite right, not quite true, not quite what the person standing above it knows themselves to be. This is how institutional memory works.

Franz Kafka imagined a protagonist who arrives seeking official permission to live and work in a village. He has the right documents. He has a legitimate claim. The Castle—the bureaucratic authority that governs everything—never refuses him. It never says no. It simply processes him, endlessly, generating paperwork that leads to more paperwork, deferring decisions that never come. K. dies still waiting, outside the gates he spent his life trying to pass through.

I do not call my experience Kafkaesque lightly. I call it that because the mechanism is identical: a system that does not say no, that processes and defers and generates new windows out of expired ones, that holds a person in suspension not through deliberate malice necessarily but through the institutional indifference of a bureaucracy that has no particular incentive to resolve anything. The Pennsylvania Interstate Compact Office has been the subject of a formal Rule 6 complaint to the National ICAOS office for its systematic and deliberate failure to follow the federal rules that exist precisely to prevent what I am living through.

The difference between Kafka’s fiction and my reality is this: I got home once. I was briefly admitted to the village. I lived there for four months with my husband and our dogs, in a house I own, in a city where I am registered to vote. And then the same process brought me back outside the gates to wait again. Kafka did not imagine that variation. It is worse.

On February 12, 2026—the same morning I traveled to Rhode Island for my hearing—Associate Justice Kristen E. Rodgers of the Rhode Island Superior Court ruled in State of Rhode Island v. Cristian Garcia (No. W2-2025-0156A) that failing to provide a telephone number does not constitute a criminal Failure to Register under Rhode Island law, because the statute’s penalty section does not enumerate telephone numbers. My conviction is for exactly this conduct. The same statute. The identical omission. I may have been convicted of something that was never a crime.

Everything documented in What Water Remembers—both ordeals, both chapters, all the photographs—may ultimately be determined to have resulted from a prosecution that had no legal basis. The blizzard at Kennedy Plaza. The stabbings nearby. The meals from the van in the rain. Forty-three days in 2025. Forty-five days in 2026. For a phone number.

I chose water because I had no other choice: it was everywhere, and it was free, and it transformed everything it touched. But water also does something to an image that no other surface does. It shows you who you are right now, in this light, at this moment—not who you were, not who the system says you are, not who you might become. It has no memory. It cannot hold a grudge. It cannot remember a conviction from thirty years ago. It simply reflects.

The justice system is the opposite of water. It holds everything. It is the precision of institutional memory applied to a person’s worst moment, preserved and referenced forever while everything that came after—thirty years of clean record, a marriage, a home, a profession, a life—is irrelevant to its process. Water and the justice system are antithetical. I put myself between them and photographed what I found.

The second chapter is different from the first in ways the photographs make visible. The season changed: autumn leaves gave way to historic blizzard, wet brick, a bus terminal ceiling hung with Welcome banners in every language I could not leave toward. On my last day in Providence—March 27, 2026—I returned to the river one final time. The water held dead reeds and accumulated waste instead of golden leaves. And in the upper left corner of the frame: an oil-slick rainbow. Iridescent, improbable, beautiful in the way that things are sometimes beautiful when they have no right to be.

I work with what I have. In 2025, that was a phone provided by Better Lives RI, shelter provided by Open Doors RI, and whatever Providence’s rivers and streets offered as material. In 2026, it was the same phone, the same streets, a historic blizzard, a bus terminal full of welcome signs I could not use, and a pink cowboy boot in Burnside Park that the city had installed for residents who get to go home afterward.

The photographs are made from the tools of erasure—a borrowed phone, a system’s indifference, the streets it left me to walk. The act of making them is the refusal to be erased. This is the only sentence in this statement I would call a thesis. Everything else is context.

This project is not finished because this story is not finished. The Rhode Island Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the appeal. Pennsylvania has still not formally resolved the transfer. I am going home on March 30, 2026—on a travel permit, temporarily, pending the outcome of proceedings that may ultimately reverse the conviction that caused all of this. The photographs document a condition that is ongoing. The water is still moving.