Megan stands in front of a beautiful vine-covered wall in Saratoga Springs, New York.
photograph taken with a Canon 60D.
paper flowers.
photographs taken in Saratoga Springs, New York with a Canon 60D.
model & crafter of those lovely paper flowers: Megan.
& she sells them, too! see her website or leave a comment with your email address for more info.
hit & run.
My mother ran my father over when I was nine or ten years old. I was in the backseat at the time and I remember the unmistakably bump of car-over-body and for a moment it was almost worse—the car kept rolling backwards, my mother trying to jump over the middle console to get from the passenger’s seat to the driver’s seat, pulling the handbrake, ruining it, finally getting her foot on the pedal.
At least that’s how I remember it. My dad was trying to get into the driver’s seat but one of my brothers had parked their car too close. He couldn’t squeeze in. He told my mother to switch the car into neutral and he’d jump in as it rolled gently backwards.
Instead, he was sucked under. I watched his torso disappear under the car and there was that thump, that thud, that tremendous jerk. My mother screaming, swearing. Me, quiet and uncertain. Thinking he was probably dead, but maybe not knowing exactly what that would mean.
He wasn’t dead, turns out. He wasn’t even particularly hurt. In a moment of panic, my mother leapt out of the car and hooked him around the armpits and wrenched him to his feet.
Shit, he said. You ran me over.
You were supposed to jump in the fucking car!
Shit, Mom, one of my brothers said from the front porch. You just ran Dad over.
He was supposed to jump in the fucking car!
Today my mom came into my bedroom at seven in the morning. Come on and see two turkeys mating, she said.
I don’t know why, but as we stood at the door to the back porch and watched these turkeys perform their particular set of bird duties, I thought of my dad getting run over by that car. The thump. The noise. The way we all laughed about it later. The way he could have been killed, you know? I doubt many people get run over by cars and escape with nothing more than a bruise.
The turkeys, the car. Somehow related. Maybe they both took place in the spring.
photograph taken in Brooklyn, New York with a Yashica-D
on leaving a place.
I’ve left many places.
When I was eighteen, I left my home for the first time. I went to a small school on the shores of Massachusetts. Four months later I left that place and I went to another school, this one in the middle of Boston. Four months later I left that school and moved into a shitty apartment in Cambridge. I buried two hermit crabs in jewelry boxes in a dark courtyard and eight months after that I left Cambridge, too. I moved home again and went to a third school, a final school. That’s where I got my degree.
A year and a half after leaving Cambridge, I left Connecticut for the second time. I moved to Brooklyn. Then I left Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan. Then I left Manhattan and went back to Brooklyn. Then Connecticut. Then Scotland.
Eight months later, I’m leaving Scotland. I’m good at leaving places. It’s something I’ve been practicing. I leave places in my sleep. I go to sleep in one place and I wake up in some other place. Sometimes, at first, I don’t even realize it. Some places look the same. Some places are the same in most ways. Some places are different in very quiet, hard to notice ways. Some places, you could be there for months and then suddenly realize—oh. this is not where i thought i was at all.
Today I walked for a really long time. I walked for two and a half miles. It was kind of like leaving. It was practice, really. Practice for leaving.
Last night I had a dream. I woke up in a sunny Santa Monica apartment. S had left for work. I wanted to go running, and so I got up and got dressed and went out. I ran for a while and then I looked around me and realized I didn’t know where I was anymore. There was some kind of river in front of me and there were all these bridges. I couldn’t run anymore but I didn’t want to stay there.
That was kind of like leaving, too.
Sometimes you leave on purpose. Other times you fall into it. Sometimes you’re happy about leaving. Sometimes you’re sad. Sometimes you’re scared. Always you’re ready. You’re ready to leave when it’s time to leave. The day before leaving, you might not want to go anymore. But then the morning gets here and you’ve already got your shoes on and you’re waiting by the door.
I’m good at packing suitcases. I’m good at remembering everything that belongs to me. I’m good at waking up early. I’m good at going, going, gone.
photograph taken by Amanda in our old apartment in New York.
roman candles.
…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
text from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
photograph taken with a Yashica-D tlr
broke down.
The bus from Palm Springs to downtown LA broke down in a tiny, nameless desert town. Nobody spoke English. The bus driver didn’t speak English. The man sitting next to me—an overjoyed, perpetually smiling character who was traveling with his large family and who kept offering me pieces of some kind of Mexican flatbread—couldn’t speak English. We all filed off the bus and I stood looking lost and unfortunate with my suitcase and camera bag and an almost-dead phone. I found a seat on a folding chair next to the side of the one room bus station, currently closed. Pretty soon a young couple—two teenage girls dressed in dirty tank tops and Converse sneakers—approached me. They hung onto each other uncomfortably, lips locked and coming up for air only to ask me the occasional question. Do you know what the fuck’s going on? Nobody speaks English, right? We can’t get through to customer service.
When the next bus came—finally, hours later—only one of them got on. She sat next to me. I wrote about her, briefly, here.
In front of us were three more teenagers: a girl and two boys. They were high on something, could barely keep their eyes opened. They giggled at the air.
We saw you making out with that girl, one of them said. That’s cool though. You’re a lesbian.
She’s my girlfriend, my seatmate said. I don’t think she ever introduced herself.
That’s nice, that’s cool. How did you meet her? Why are you leaving her behind?
We met online, she said.
How long have you been together?
Oh, only the last couple hours. We only met for the first time at the bus stop.
She had another girlfriend back home in Minnesota, she explained.
She was one of those people who talks fast and high and offers you whatever she has—food or drinks or hits from a moist joint. One of those people who want so much to be talked to and to be listened to that they’ll say anything they think you want to hear. She was entertaining. She kept those three teenagers transfixed for the three hours to LA. I put my headphones on and closed my eyes and felt the dust of the desert on every square inch of my skin.
I thought about her last night when I couldn’t sleep. I woke up around midnight to a dream about spiders and I lay in bed with the lights out playing Hearts on my phone. I don’t know what made me think of her. Probably just—she was fascinating. She was young and she was scared and she was fascinating. And who knows how much of what she said was true. It doesn’t really matter anyway. It was all because she wanted someone to talk to her. It was all because she didn’t want to be alone.
photograph taken with a Canon 60D in Palm Springs
these three things/ artists in montmartre.
photographs taken in Montmartre, Paris, France with a Minolta X-700
thirty-two weeks gone.
This is the last time I’ll write one of these. In five days I leave Scotland for the next big thing, the next weird adventure. I’m not quite ready to announce what that is, but in some ways it’s safer than coming here and in other ways it’s a whole new set of risks and chances.
Yesterday I took a long walk. I was behind a little family, a mom and a dad and a young boy. As I watched, the boy doubled over and put his hand to his mouth. His parents stopped and watched him. And then he started laughing. Laughing, laughing, and he pulled his hand away from his mouth and held his palm up to show them. A little white tooth. He’d lost a tooth. The mom laughed, took it, put it into her pocket. The dad was overjoyed. He ruffled the kid’s hair. He kissed the kid on the top of his head. He put his arm around the kid and pulled him close.
Next I walked through a little street fair on Castle Street and a man behind a booth gave me a little pink rock. He handed me four pieces of oddly-cut wood and told me to make a square. I couldn’t. I try, and I couldn’t.
It’s for luck! he insisted.
I tried, I said.
It’s good luck if you can do it, he said.
I left the pieces on the counter. I took the rock. I held it in my hand like a tooth. I waited for praise.
photographs taken in Skye with a Minolta X-700
photo story/ borghese hermaphroditus
The Louvre was enormous and impossible to navigate. My brother held the map and led us to the main attractions: The Mona Lisa, St. Mary Magdalene, Venus de Milo. We passed Sleeping Hermaphroditos by mistake. The mattress, carved by Bernini, looks anything but stone-like. You want to touch it. You want to confirm its hardness. The figure- eyes closed, blankets mussed, unapologetically nude- is tranquil and calm. It’s like a photograph come to life. I could have looked at it for hours.
early September 2009, Borghese Hermaphroditus at the Louvre.
taken with a Minolta X-700 and 50mm lens, color film.
exposure unknown.
photograph taken in Paris, France.
convincing.
Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. “I’m okay” we say. “I’m alright”. But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can’t get it off. That’s when you realize that sometimes it isn’t even an answer—it’s a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.
text from Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which I’m currently reading and recommending.
photograph taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim, Poland
