I want to…
…do this – NOW!
Survival
I remember the setting as a grainy black and white film; my mother, my aunt and I watching my cousins wedding, which I also remember as a grainy black and white film. Straight out of the best med school in Turkey, with their whole lives as successful doctors ahead of them, they were all celebrating my cousin and her husband, the love of her life. I remember how wasted they all seemed to be, I remember how happy everyone looked and most of all I remember, when I saw the groom’s friends throwing him joyful up in the air, I thought to myself, as a seventeen-year-old at the time, that I would like to have a wedding like that if I were to get married some day.
She has become one of the most successful doctors in Turkey, she attends congresses and dinner parties all over the world, she is gorgeous, she is stylish – and now she is also a divorcè.
It strikes me that nothing surprises me anymore. When my mother told me the news I said ‘Ah well, that’s life.’ – not because I did not believe in their marriage, certainly not because I do not care, but simply because life is unpredictable, and lately, unpredictable has had an easing effect on me. My mother didn’t seem to be surprised by my lack of reaction, which made me think of how everything in life evolves to become normal as you get stronger. How strong should we be able to become? Is being strong supposed to be equal to being able to ease your way through everything?
Eventually, my cousin will fall in love again, maybe this time it will be a wine loving American doctor from one of the dinner parties she loves to attend in California.
When all comes down to it, life is about surviving, in one way or the other, isn’t it?
How it ended
Alex started smoking again whenever he lost a woman. When he fell in love again he would quit. And when love died, he’d light up again.
…
And no small part of this reflex was mythological – indulging a romantic image of himself as a lone figure standing on a bridge in a foreign city, cigarette cupped in his hand, his leather jacket open to the elements.
…
His sense of loss seemed more real when he imagined himself through the eyes of strangers.
Jay McInerney
untitled
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
‘Oh, sure you know,’ the photographer said.
‘She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, ‘to be everything.’
Sylvia Plath
Interesting people
To John,
who convinced me that everyone who is
interesting has a past
Jeannette Walls
Not hers
When he moved to her country, the country was not big enough for her to stay, so she packed her suitcase, bought a ticket to nowhere and went away. Some people thought she was on the run, which was not the case; they would understand, if only they knew.
The questions were not hers to answer. The guilt was not hers to deal with. She left the glasses fallen into thousand pieces, they were not hers to glue together. She abandoned the empty canvases dusting under the staircase. She put on one of her thousand white dresses, switched on her iPod playing tunes of her self composed silence and went away. Her smile came along. Her happiness she carried with her.
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