Festival of Choices Finnisage
Lara Konrad
All we do is live
How we go to sleep and wake up, how we continue going places after we’ve just came from somewhere, how some strangers become everything, and how others become nothing, how we hope for love that lasts, how we believe in forever when it hurts the most, how we say nice things because we feel we have to, how we say ugly things and sometimes mean them, how time is always there, how on weekends we go to museums and parks and concerts and exaggerate feeling, how cultural entertainment is also about accomplishments, how truth is mostly forgotten, how we always misinterpret memory, how we smile until the picture is taken, how we love most when something’s dying, how we abstract loneliness, how we get depressed if we don’t see the sky, how we’re ambivalent towards nature, how individualism doesn’t interest us anymore, how we die without purpose, how we change our mind at the end, how we always live because we’re supposed to live.
And then I think about mom. How from time to time she stops during walks and presses her face gently into the blossoming of plants as to absorb their smell more directly. While she remains bend over lilacs or jasmine or magnolias, she inhales and exhales, like she’s a woman who hasn’t remembered her childhood in a while. Like she remembers, right there, she’s breathing and still living and how she was always expected to last here. And when I watch her body closer to nature, awkward yet somehow save, I always think about how I never know if her impulse is driven by a type of fluid genuinity, or an engendered performance that assumes how to exist socially. And every time I ask myself if she bends over into those flowers because right then she might remember how she has always wanted to notice a life more consciously. Or if she bends over because I’m right behind her, watching, simultaneously exaggerating the meaning of it all.