photographs of you

[threeplusfire]

I found one of my favorite photographs today, of me at sixteen. It was taken in front of the opera house in Paris, where I was wearing Christian's shirt and my Docs. I can't remember who took the picture for me. My hair was so long back then, and I was so skinny. I can hardly remember that girl. I do remember being very sad, and lonely, and listening to Depeche Mode on the balcony over the sea at Normandy. It sounds so much more romantic than it really was.

Hard to explain, how I'm happy and sad at the same time. Happy for the freedom of this new life, happy for so many things that are right and better now. Sad for things that never were or can't be, things that for the most part have never existed outside my head. I have always lived too much there, inside. These created worlds and lives sustained me in the absence of more tangible ones.

In one of the boxes I found my acceptance letter into UT, and the program from my grandfather's funeral. There were two comics, carefully preserved in layers of scotch tape. All the articles published in the Texan, a clipping of the staf listing with my name in the credits. My notebooks from 1999 to 2001, full of class notes, Russian letters to no one, bad writing and hysterical journal entries. A magazine article about Nabokov, and one about people who fake suicides online in their blogs. It was strange to touch those things.

I'm getting older, and sometimes I wonder if I'll always be living this way.

Comments

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

daily, i find myself wondering if i willalways feel this way. if this is life. i've forever been waiting for my "real life" to begin. perhaps i must accept that is already has; this is it. that's hard to do when it is so far from what i wanted it to be.

Exactly. I have the same feeling. Really - it's good to know that I'm not crazy and I'm not the only person with this feeling. Not that I want anyone else to be so conflicted.