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 pulled me down into the murkiest depths. The entire world stopped a few months later, and it was easy to blame this sense on a general foreboding. We all feel like we are whistling past the graveyard on some days. There is always a cold draft, and a door we pass but dare not crane our neck to look inside. 

The shutdown was a relief in some ways. No more pressure to succeed in the old ways. No more glad-handing and back stabbing. No more deceit. No more bloody competitions. No more disappointment. No more defeat. No more ass-kissing. No more winning. Just time with the family, playing board games after dinner as we kept out chins up. 

It is so easy to drift into nostalgia, to remember the days past as better. It is so easy to speak of what we have lost - be it a cherished diner, a favorite pair of jeans or a way of living. It something we all share, some tiny thread that slips through every one of our pockets and ties us into one great messy bit of cloth. Well, that’s the romantic idea. In truth, we are just lost without any thread. 

There is no looking back, no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

We can only embrace the change, which is such a tall order when you were raised on different fairy tales, different glass slippers, different fairy godmothers. They all evaporate into history. They are all eclipsed by something worse or by something better or just something else. In Woyzcek, by Georg Büchner, there is a fairy tale about a boy that sits on a pot and cries when he learns all of this, that the stars are not the stars, the moon is not the moon. 

Even if that rainbow was real, and I travelled beyond it - there was no magical story to wrap myself in, no happy ending, just the simple beauty of that blind man singing on the corner, his voice frail, no idea if anyone was listening but singing all the same, maybe because that is all that he knows how to do.