WHAT I’M WEARING: PRIMARK LONG NAVY COAT, PRIMARK NAVY BLOUSE, PRIMARK TARTAN TROUSERS, PRIMARK WHITE SNEAKERS & PRIMARK BLACK FEDORA
There is a song I adore by Borns called ‘Past Lives‘, perhaps you’ve heard it, perhaps you haven’t. And while we do only get one life, I have always envisioned the various chapters of mine as lives in themselves, purely because when I look back, the past is always tinged with a light that seems so absolutely different to where I am right now. I am detrimentally nostalgic so I fear this might be a simple case of over-sentimentalization, but then again, I see my life as a story – and no good story is ever boring. Do I embellish the past? Absolutely but accidentally so. Does it distort dramatically as it inches further away from today? Yes. Let’s just say, I hope one day my nostalgia finds it’s final outlet in the form of a memoir, one that I hope people other than my parents might like to read. University feels like a shadow ago, something that darted away quickly, rendering it’s reality doubtful. It’s as if I dreamed up those three years spent in that sleepy northern England town. Time turns what happened into a delusion; and that is fascinating; it haunts and grips me in a way I cannot even adequately convey here. When I think about the sheer volume of love I felt for men I once knew? It’s like an emotion trapped underwater, the edges are blurred away so it’s impossible to grip. Sharp emotions soften to liquid with time. No longer physically felt but I like to believe they still flow through our veins. Which brings me to where I’m sat in these photographs, a spot I like to call the ‘wing’ of Bir Hakeim bridge. I’ve hoisted myself up here many, many times over the 8 years that now span my relationship with Paris. Once with large clumps of golden leaves in my hands and a red hat on my head, another with an ex boyfriend of mine, he had a briefcase slung over his back ; I still have the photograph I took of him somewhere. And those are just the two I can casually recall, so many have melted into the liquid of my past – but I can feel them all whenever I come back and stand or sit and stop right here. That’s how my nostalgia works, suddenly it surfaces and I feel all these infinite, tiny nuances that used to be. My past lives, time rained them away, but they do, I swear in my veins they still stay.
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