Yesterday I got rid of all my old photos, my old letters and emails, my old trinkets and souvenirs. Isn’t all nostalgia false? As I scrubbed, I examined these things, things for years I had saved like treasure. I am glad I remember the truth. These were not honest records, let alone mature or expansive ones. They were poses, apologia, propaganda, wishes—separated by voids of convenient omission.
Isn’t it a terrifying thought, that one day you could lose your memories and in their place absorb from your own shoeboxes and shelves of talismans the frozen smiles of snapshots, the bias confirmation of postcards, the revisionism of letters, the tawdriness of keepsakes, and the oblivion of the unmentioned, as true? As you?
I want us to make something that will never last, that was never meant to. A winter dusting while the city sleeps. A snowflake caught in an updraft, lifted but not melted. My breath, a mist that vanishes and resurges.
I will take my shovel to the roof and form a sculpture of pure expression and snow, something beyond irony or reference or didactics, and that only a handful of people will ever see, the executives still at their desks at midnight, the janitors, the security guard taking a break from his beat to gaze down from those great heights surrounding me.
An instant can last until the instant you die, but what takes years to accomplish is brutally abbreviated by memory. I want a second in slow motion with you, the silence anticipating your laugh, the steams of our breath touching, with snowflakes fixed into this picture like a constellation.
I want to call a perfect stranger and tell him that I love you, that I am bursting to tell you so. But I will not ask for advice, I will not want to be released. I will hope the need will never leave me.
Photographers take thousands of pictures to keep just one. I want to spend a day with you, culminating in a look, a touch, a sound I will never forget, and perhaps if it is perfect, I will never see you again.
YES
this is wonderful
Simply beautiful …
absolutely wonderful. i’m inspired.
oh my god, this is beautiful and it’s exactly what i’ve been trying to say.
i want to read it over and over and over again.
thank you
for this
I wish I could tell you, you are beautiful as you are. Broken, and battered but so heartbreakingly perfect at the same time.
I want a moment with you that feels like a lifetime but flashes by in seconds. That flutters of the edge of disaster, and at the last second comes swooping back to safety. A moment that feels so close to shattering, you hold your breath for fear of destroying it.
You know I am envious of those who spend there whol lives being complacent. I could never be, I want to feel a new moment everyday for the rest of my life. Be it hurtful or amazing I never want it to feel the same.
I want to see you through a looking glass, so skewed and bone shatteringly beautiful. I want to chase you, find you, only to lose you all over again. To start again.
all or nothing.
either we make something that will last.
or we make nothing at all.
but … you wanna make something that will never last.
:(
I am completely enamored.
Bravo.
want to spend a day with you, build up to a look, a touch, a sound I will never forget, and never see you again.
This reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy. I deeply struggle to find value and significance in such transience, but I am also deeply attracted to it.
I want to see five centimetres per second, petals so ephemeral like our lives. To put you on a pedestal and stay away, turn the lock and destroy the key. You will last forever, in my memory. Our distance kills who you really are. I think I (my sanity) prefer(s) that.
I (never) want to know you again, to learn we might not be like putty; separate and inseparable. I’ll be happy with these distorted kaleidoscope images. You are beautiful and immortally so, as long as I keep you at arm’s length. My memories will outlast us.
I existed for the past and breathed for the future… he lived in the present and prayed for a moment.
Without you I would never feel… But I do, and I am sorrier than I can ever say.