À la recherche du temps perdu

Mother, still stubbornly acting as if nothing is new, insists I should get a job. "You can't live off my money forever" she says, but the way she says it (not really condescending but without any sense of self-awareness) makes me seriously consider just that as an alternative. When I'm spiteful I feel like telling her about all of you that have asked me to write a book, just to see her freeze at the thought of the scandals such a book could result in.

Not much else has happened. I went out to buy lilies yesterday and for the first time I felt lost amidst all this steel, stone and concrete. I love the sound of pavement under high heels and yellow cabs rushing past skyscrapers over streets and avenues, but sometimes in the gray those childhood memories come back to me, like a splinter in my mind: running barefoot in high sun-drenched grass, picking spring flowers and chasing butterflies over the fields around our summer house.

They were loving times, so heartbreakingly truthful and real, but like everything else they couldn't last forever. It has to be life's saddest and most definite tragedy, that nothing beautiful survives and that all that can be left of it in the end is the ashes, the smoldering charcoal and, for as long as we're alive, the haunting memories of times that have passed and will never come back.