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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

tiny opera

You can hear her through the kitchen wall sometimes. She sings scales, then something I guess is Verdi. She is nameless, faceless. There are so many stout old women in musty fur coats tiptoeing across the icy sidewalk when I do go outside. She could be any of them. 

I assign something to the moments I hear her, like a comet or a moon circling the little world of our kitchen. She is like the rabbit that hid in our front yard when E was born, a random sign of something significant, but impossible to pin down. 
I notice her. 
I miss her. 

Winter has smothered the day to day, the metronome of the week. E is better, but is resting before I put her back in school. I have left the house for a handful of of hours in the past two weeks, just enough to smell the hard soap smell of the gutter, mixing with sliced cucumbers and diesel as I cram eggs and bread and milk into bags I pull across my shoulder. The cars are still trying to run me over, even when I pass the entrance to a parking lot they pull in front of me and I shake my head at them resisting the urge to thump my fist on the shiny black hood of their Porsche. The man's window is down and he stares back at me as if he is memorizing my face. I will never accept this petty hustling, this shoving match that happens every time I set foot outside our apartment. I remember being a boy, stranded in the middle of nowhere on our farm with no one to play with but my brother. We made attempts at games like baseball, employing a complex army of ghost men who ran bases, stole them and could even get tagged out by other ghost players. A few innings into the process, my brother would hit one way into a hay field and by the time I retrieved it he was gone. 

Running to my parents with tears on my cheeks, I would shout about how it wasn't fair for him to do that. They would shrug their shoulders, maybe laugh at me a little. "What did you expect?" They would ask me. "Do you really think the world is supposed to be fair?"



N is at her mother's house. E is fast asleep, her arms twisted in a ballet pose above the blankets. I walk the rooms, a box of her cereal under my arm. I cannot sleep.

All at once, the walls light up. I hear a boom in the direction of the White House. On the balcony, I imagine I will see tanks and explosions. It is just fireworks, flaring into the sky long after the children are asleep. This place is a real fucking Disney Land I tell myself, as the river reflects red pom poms and trickles of white. 

Closing the window, the smell of gunpowder and smoke drifts into the room. It isn't a holiday. It isn't Chinese New Years. It is just some random noise and lights for ten minutes on a Saturday night.   
 

I dream of E's mother running across the bedroom and to the balcony as if she is going to jump to her death, but then she catches herself. It does not happen in slow motion. It is all very real. She is wearing all white.






Comments

liv said…
An autobiography, from the very beginning. Yes, that is what is required! How did this boy from there become this man here? The story needs to be told.

So glad E is doing better.

The photo of the fireworks??!! STUNNING. A Marco North jewel, that one is! So glad you don't give up. Stay well yourself and please continue to resist the urge to pound the hood of that car, this is not NY!

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