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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
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cold water (broken)

 

A death of a thousand tiny cuts is more than a wry expression, more than a dark laugh at the night sky. Some battles are won with the gentle click of a door as it closes. Some changes sneak in like the edge of the sky as it grows brighter, just before the sun rises. These changes are unrecognizable, until the inevitable presents itself and it is all too late. 

The hot water is turned off for ten days, as it is every summer. Little notes were tacked to entry doors, an official warning with dates and hours. It has become a lesson in tolerance, a bitter stretch of time to boil pots of water and fill a basin in the tub that we keep for this sole use. Cold water is mixed in until the temperature is somewhere between scalding and lukewarm. Standing with a bar of soap like some old west movie the splashing and makeshift bathing runs its course. The basin grows murky, and it is all tossed down the drain, somehow feeling just as dirty as you stepped into the tub. But you swallow all of those twinges of anger and humiliation. It’s just hot water for Christ’s sake. It’s only ten days. 

And then the magic term that blankets it all.

“It could be much worse.”

This is the soul-crushing refrain. How can anyone complain, knowing that in another breath, they are actually so lucky? This is how you control people. This is how you tape their mouths shut. This is how the battle is lost. We are thankful by nature. We drift past a terrible car crash and think “thank God that was not me”. In our humility, we are chained to tolerance and in this tolerance, anything can be done to us. Take away one thing, and get me used to it. Take away more the next day, and the next. Whittle me down to a splinter, and I will wrap my arms around my wife and kids and say “at least we are ok”. 

I go to the faucet, twisting it left by habit and nothing comes out but a gasp of stale air. My head shakes, forgetful as always – a creature of habit. I twist it right, and cold water spurts out. It is splashed on my face, the back of my neck and I catch myself in the mirror, broken.

 

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