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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 falling boy (too bitter a fruit)




He was 17. Big brown eyes, and a gentle smile. I imagine he had a good supply of wisecracks behind that bold chin. He played soccer on the national youth team. A young leader, a son, a dear friend to many. Zaki bought everyone in his class hamburgers after school was closed for a week in the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack. Somehow, I read all this, absorbing the details as they etch a picture in the dim morning light. He was one of many trying to escape, grabbing onto the plane thinking they would let him in. As it took off, and people surrendered to the moment, as they dropped back to the tarmac he did not let go. The wind grew, and still he held on. They say it reached 120 miles per hour before he fell off. 

It is a strange phenomenon, this modern world of ours where we hear a story about someone we never knew, yet it stops me dead in my tracks. The memories flood back, all of the idiotic things that I did at his age, for no great reason. The risk was not even a trill, just that blind foolishness of youth as we dove headfirst without thinking, convinced we were invincible, that we knew everything. 

The kitchen smells like sulphur and burnt matches. This young man’s random last words hang in the air all day. At one point, the new guitar comes out of the case and I think to write something about him, to paint just a little corner of the frame, not some giant canvas. To pay him some tribute with a few gentle chords. And yes, the bones of a song do appear but I do not like it. It is too bitter a fruit. 

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