The window is open here at the office, to let the air in and the sound of the birds. I keep trying to reach back to Malaysia, to the last year, and remember something about the heat and I can't. Sunday, the weather was beautiful and I slept on the sofa in the sun for hours while the girls watched Japanese TV. The night before, we had been at a party and I had drunk Mexican beer while the children ran around upstairs, so the day felt sedated and slow, the way Sundays are for sinners who have nothing to do, nowhere to check in. When it got later in the afternoon, we all walked up to the park, past Vicarage Rd and the church surrounded my headstones that are split or splitting. We all talked about dying and being dead, looking at the names and dates. We went to the park and everyone played, and then we sat in a coffee shop on the high street, the doors open because it was warm, and talked about nothing in particular. We walked home, had pasta, the children bathed, and we all went to sleep, a kind of perfect performance of the middle class life.
10 March 2014
Stepping
This weekend, I uploaded all of Naomi's photos from the last year (from the camera I bought her, which Yoko insists on telling people was the cheapest camera in the shop) in hopes to use the flash disk for another project. As I skimmed through them, the whole last year through her eyes unfolded. The terrace house in Taman Sri Minang. The month away in Japan that I feared would stretch into a year or lifetime. All of the pictures are honest in a way that the pictures that I take are not — they have an accidental quality to them. They don't have any shame or pretence to them — a photo of Mia sitting naked at the gate of the house in Malaysia, blurry and unplanned, haunting in a way.


