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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 dove (many hands)

 

The guitar arrives, and a young man waits in the hallway as we take it inside. I crack the case open, that new car smell wafting out. It needs to be tuned of course. The body slides out, all reflections and odd details. It feels so solid in my hands, like a tiny mountain. There is a dove on the pick guard, where my hand rests for a moment before the first strum. 

As I brush across the strings for the first time I think of the life it lived before now. The factory, the workers that shaped it. Great lumbering machines and thunderous sounds. Clouds of paint and gloss and sawdust. So many hands that it took to build it. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers until the guitar was called done, a tiny sticker on the back of the neck with someone’s name scribbled on it. And then somehow it made its way here of all places. The eighth floor, and our messy living room. Me, on a stool with an Am chord, in the hot afternoon. 

It goes back in the case, so snug. 

Time to pay the man in the hall. 

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