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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow

the red cup

The sky is not fully dark at seven now. Hard clouds are coughing from double smokestacks past the river. The cat tries to knock me over, starving in the cold morning air. E is asleep in a perfect cocoon of cartoon sheets, clutching a stuffed dog named Katya.

I make coffee without turning the kitchen light on. The cat eats noisily as I wait for the familiar, hoarse voice of the little moka. I put sugar at the bottom of the cup, and don't mind it's not clean.

I splash milk in, and sit on the window's edge, looking down at the covered fountain in the center of the courtyard. As I drink from the cup, I smell something unfamiliar. I touch my fingers to my nose for a moment - and realize this cup was used on Saturday for our little dinner party. New friends had visited, with a daughter to play with E, and fresh pastries, with a bottle of red wine and the bread I had forgotten to buy, with an unattached woman.

It was her perfume on my red coffee cup, a sort of gift she had left behind. I closed my eyes, imagining her hands resting on the table, how she hid behind her hair, her chin pinned to her chest.

Breathing in her perfume, I drank in the morning light and the sweet coffee and smiled to myself.

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