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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

you know my name


Just before we left Brooklyn, when I was five years old we spied a corner of fresh sidewalk. I scrawled my name in it with a twig, and pressed my palm into the wet cement. My brother did the same. We had left our mark, and could leave with a strange bit of satisfaction. A part of us would remain. I can remember thinking of that patch of sidewalk before I fell asleep at night, convinced it would be there forever, that when I was fifty or eighty years old - that someday I would revisit that corner on Garfield off the park and nod, crack a smile, and stare off into the horizon contented.

Of course, that wet scribble was gone within five years. I also knew that, but held both truths close to my chest. There was no single reality, but a marriage of the two positions. If I could close my eyes and see it, that proved it was there. People could crouch down, deciphering that odd scribble and know my name.

Nothing else mattered.

I never carved my name in a tree, no hearts, no girlfriend's name in crooked letters. I never spray painted anything on a wall. That Brooklyn sidewalk was all I needed.


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