aftersun
love-live-tweeting the film without timestamps. feelings in consecutive order:
There’s a reason why we pull our phones sees sunsets and sunrises before our own eyes do.
An incredible opening where we are asked what we thought we’d be doing from the vantage point of 11 years old.
Do you even remember being a pre-teen? What were your dance moves like when you danced alone in your room?
Have you ever taken the Megabus from San Francisco to Los Angeles? How dark it is? The danger you feel by simply closing your eyes? The neon blues on bodies?
The glimmer, the faithful flint of a cigarette in pitch black night?
Your breaths, and mine, music together.
Why is it that we want to look at memories at night? Why right before sleep?
3:08
AM
Hearing about head through the slits of stalls.
A simple cotton tee in a pair of knee length chinos begs me to ask, “Why isn’t Paul Mescal my dad?” And that begs me to question myself, “Is this the same as saying ‘I wish I was white’?”
Teach me how to fight. Grab my arms. Hold me. Still.
Are we looking at the same sky? Are you underneath it? Or above it?
Looking at people in pairs, asking, Can we do that?
Side by side, can we move like the rest of the world?
The Macarena. Embarrass me. Embarrass you. Embrace me.
At 11, did you also skim through lines of a hard book? Words you didn’t understand? For the longest time I didn’t know how to sound out catastrophe. What it was supposed to sound like, what it meant.
At the water, I look at his back and then I look at your body. The curves, the waves, the weightless buoy of your body, how it floats with every passing relief, echoed sighs.
The dance scenes flash by in every blink and I hear Kylie Minogue and the summer-wrinkle rustle of your white T-shirt, label out, without a care, carelessly yourself.
Daynaps. Hashish. Playing cards and paper umbrellas in half-drunk drinks.
As a kid, I was always jealous of the cash in other kids’ pockets, where it came from. If I was currency, the country I came from.
Road Rage — Cataconia
A sky of paraglides cross fades to blue pool reflections.
Mescal spits on the mirror and I wish it was my mouth.
What did you do for your 11th birthday?
Blue — Tender
Daughter to Father: Do you think you’ll ever move back to Scotland? = Do you think you’ll ever call me home?
Lose My Religion — R.E.M.
Have you too said the lyrics to a song? All alone? As if on a stage?
What is the saddest song you now?
I look at memories of us more often than I message you.
Breathing
Breathing
Breaths
Down
In
Under my feet
On the rug
Mornings, moons, many many nights weigh down on me.
Yet I get up because there is light, so much of it that I don’t know what to do but pump breaths, patterned, in and out of me, a cycle of recycled pasts to put me in place of the present tense.
I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know how to tell you how lonely I am
Without you.
Get older, tell me about your first kiss, the drugs you take, the nights you’ve had, stories you’ve told me thousand times over, the flourishes, the jests. Dumb little things you laughed at. Dumb little things you do.
I want to be dumb with you.
Still-life Terrance Malick memorywork.
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