CABOODLE MAKEUP CASES

{a recent period of severe illness combined with me moving sluggishly into a new stage of my life got me thinking. And when I think, I think a lot. About a lot. This resolution series is the outcome of me looking at myself reflectively and trying to weed out what pains me, and build upon what aids me}

Resolution 1 is to understand and excavate my travels, share what I can, explain what I can't.
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Can a place stay with you? Can a town or a city, a building or a road uproot itself from all it is entangled in and become a part of you? Can even the slightest splinter or a cracked fragment of some fixed place lose its geography and become something of you?



Logic would suggest otherwise, give a negative answer to thoughts so whimsical. But then logic doesn’t always hold sway in our lives: or at least not my own, I won’t speak for you. Instead I would say that in my life there are places which have become me, that have strung themselves through me and around my person in a way that goes beyond recollection or recall. These places, the markings on their walls, the expanse of their horizons, the people and the stories that they carry are all diminished within me: but they do not diminish me. I feel them even now, even years since I last left them. I feel them as surely as I do my chest rising with a morning breath or my eyes flitting in a nervous blink. It is a sensation of something stronger than memory, of something a touch more profound than simple pleasure or pain. These places, something of what they are and why they changed me is now within me even now.



Careless words I know, slight little sentences looking for drama in the rolling clicks of recollections and emotion. I know that the flimsy replays of our minds can plays tricks on a willing man: their visions are effortlessly capable of pulling into focus vibrant recollections of something that was in fact altogether normal. I am aware thsat memory strips away hunger, fatigue, nerves and boredom and leaves you with only the deeper ebbs of emotion. But that is not what I am talking of right now, not what I experience when these places revisit me and I them. I can only say again that they are within me. I can only say in finality that it is not an earnest slideshow of my memory that I experience. It is instead the truth that I carry with me weightless fragments of the tired cities of my travels, I breath the opaque vapours of tales told to me in rooms long emptied, I walk to the beat of the un-ceasing pulse of hidden pastures clustered high in lonely mountain ranges, I lie at night with the weight of rotten roads and aching buildings weighing me into sleep. I have all this and more buried deep inside of me.



I feel some places more than others, I feel more for some than others, but I feel them all at sometime. They are latent and patient and then suddenly, startled into life and urgency. Triggered by the smaller tracts and slivers of emotion that are there in the everyday, if you feel them enough. A lonely familiar walk is interuppted by the rolling minor piano chords from a half heard song. Those notes are heard, are felt and then they shift and fall through my senses, twisting themselves itself into the cracked pavements of a deserted street and onece more I am in Sarajevo and Sarajevo is in me. For those moments, for as long as I feel those piano chords I also feel the weave and warp of the door frames that lined that street, that begged for their old lives. I can feel the cool air of the abandoned rooms, I can feel the loss of those tired places. Those rooms and those walls became me at sometime and it feels as if they will never leave. Maybe as I pulled myself up and into the stairwells and corridors something fractured and embedded itself under my skin? Maybe the dust that floated in those rooms coalesced as it was inhaled; gathering somewhere beyond physiology to become something of me? Maybe none of this is true, but they are within me nonetheless.



At other times life interrupts, radio static cracks and falters; dying analogue flaws amidst all this digital clarity. With each hiss and abrasion the sensation of jolting movement, of the past growing into form and I am a cooling sky high in the Caucasus Mountains: immediately around me would be the creaking frame of a wooden porch; the structure of that long gone moment. But it is not there that is lost inside me, it is not the truth of that place that I have carried home. No, it is that pallid sky that bowls across the mountain valley that I begin to breathe. It is Mount Kazbegi’s cragged black shard that cuts into that sky that I feel solidifying in my chest. It is the serene silhouette of the Mt Sameba church perched high in the folds of that very same mountain and that very same sky that calms me as it takes its place and form. It is the distance and mystery of places left behind that I have absorbed, it is the pitch and emotion, the anxiety and the apathy

A shiny and v. safe metal plank doubles as a very short wall-mount mirror. The kids demonstrated how they could check faces and hands after washing at the (oojieboojie) mini industrial sink, toddler height and completely adorable like the miniatures in doll houses.

Scarlett's special child of the week lunch where I surprised her by unexpectedly showing up.