let lemons be angry

I stumbled upon chloe's blog. I still have those letters she wrote me two years ago after buggy's death, all folded up in that mg way and written in her mg handwriting, things i learnt from her in sec one. I remember her saying she couldn't cry. And i cried because of the things she wrote, tiny grasps of their beautiful friendship in small anecdotes. The small things make up our world. I'd like to make a movie about my world. About a girl who's average in everything and lacking in some things, who doesn't quite fit in anywhere, but still manages to be happy. Maybe if i made the movie and sat down to watch it, i'd finally understand where i am. Pakster once said she wants to make a movie with the camera focusing just on shoes. If they were my shoes, they'd be a pair of paint-splattered sneakers hurrying along a stone path strewn with casuarina needles, then up the marble steps and up an escalator, tapping impatiently, walking through open doors and staying put on the far side of the train. Toes don't say much within shoe prisons. My shoes wouldn't tell much of a story. I go to the same places everyday at the same time, tread upon the same routes, travel in circles and circles. Circles and circles, and nothing else. Movie-maker, can we shoot off location?

When we take a photo, we're trying to cage a memory, cage a fleeting burst of emotion. So we'll always remember that we had such a moment. We took photos today in the booth, in the dressing room, and in-between, as a keepsake of this day of guiltless frivolity. The photo doesn't make the moment last longer. The photo is lifeless. There you are preserved in that moment on paper, trapped in a 2-d landscape that means more than exposure can express on film, in the closed world of that moment, forever sealed off from the rest of time. Can you return? Never. You can pretend to, and maybe that's why you frame photos or carry them with you. That one captured moment reminds you of a thousand other moments related to that memory. You don't ever want to forget what you once had. The cruellest deed we can commit is forget. So you take a photograph. As if in desperation to give your emotions immortality. When will we stop cheating ourselves, and wake up to the fact that the only real way to make a moment last is to make more of those moments? I sent you that photo so that you will always remember that evening, but i know i remember it differently. The spilled nuts, your over-the-top paraphenalia, the white soda, your orange loudhailer, the crowded couch, the slamming door, the cheers, your jogging-on-the-spot, the beef jerky, the projector. I can't ever return to that.