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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 arc of avoidance / grasshoppers (the good dream)

She has questions about her mother. She sees the bedroom door closed, the depression, the woman behind it obsessed with money and the skin on her face and nothing else. 

She wants to know why this woman lies to her about almost everything. She wants to know why the refrigerator is near-empty in that house. She tells me about the memories she has of the three of us living together, and a specific fight one summer day. E remembers holding my neck and hanging off of me as that woman was screaming and how I took her outside and we had a long walk down by the river until the sun went down. E knows I told her some important things that day, but remembers none of them, just the look on my face, and the hoarse, embarrassed whisper of my voice after the argument.


The hot water has returned and we breathe relief. It is the time for putting things behind us. I make sure she takes a good long bath. She has a black ring around her neck even after the skin on her fingers has pruned up. I put the red plastic bucket behind the sink.  The arc of avoidance swings hard today.  This is the cleansing breath.

She wanders through the house on tiptoes, the towel wrapped tight around her.

The next morning she tells me she had a good dream.
"What was in it?" I ask.
"Well, it was you and me and we were in a house." She says.
"This house?" I ask.
"No, a house we never went to." She replies. "And there was a swing from the roof and I was on the swing and you were pushing me."
I nod and sip some coffee.
"And there were some grasshoppers in the street, and they were all walking in a line." She says, smiling. "They were all carrying a piece of corn."
"Really!" I say.
She nods.
"They were smiling." She says. "All of them."

Comments

liv said…
Exquisite photo!

She is so worth - everything.
Incognita said…
She has such a magical aura.

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