they asked me how work was. i said fine. i had a wry smile. then i conceded, great. simply great. i couldn’t help but grin.

exhaustion.
the taxi driver drove too fast whenever traffic allowed him to. i watched through the window, streets and avenues all painted in black and orange, thousand of cars like lost without any coherent direction, pedestrians flashing at intersections, magically appearing and disappearing in the night, all part of a saturday night dance that i don’t want to be in. we got stuck on a bridge and the waters hypnotized me. unusually enough, the driver didn’t say a word. he barely acknowledged the direction i gave him, he barely muttered thanks when i paid the fare. i wouldn’t have liked him to talk anyway. i was feeling heavy, the same heaviness that has been within me for weeks now. i don’t know how to figure that out, its complex oddity seems out of grasp, even though i know that it’s happened to me before, i know that feeling, i recognize the emptiness, its signals of alarm as a lack of coherence, an utter absurdity, my unability to sort anything out and how i must take the decision to keep going on no matter what minute after minute. i know where i come from but i don’t know where i’m headed.

i keep thinking about new york again. every now and then my thoughts wander there and get stuck, hypnotized. i only remember blue maybe because of the last full day i spent there. mid-september seemed like the june i know in paris. sunny and warm. light too. i took a nap in the sun in central park, walked all the way down on broadway, before reaching brooklyn via the bridge. i was slightly light-headed. i took a ton of pictures on the way. streets, buildings, cars, taxis, trees and people, the bridge, everything. when i came back to grand central, everything seemed to have settled down in the most perfect way, and i thought that it wouldn’t matter if i just died instantly. my bag was full of the blacks and whites and grays i’d captured, but if i hadn’t nearly seen a thousandth of what i wished i had, yet, it didn’t matter. the insane thought of dying without regrets lasted but a second. i didn’t know where i was headed, but i knew where i was coming from.
i returned home eventually a few days later. just about a couple of months after, i made my first “promo” pictures of a band. i try to figure out where i am now, but it seems to me like a giant absurdity, a heaviness is stuck in me for weeks now, or maybe months, i don’t know for sure, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me. i walk from concerts to appointments to meetings with friends to photo shootings to my editors’ offices and all the way back home, and it still doesn’t make sense, i feel like i don’t know how things work except for cameras, the more i’m able to capture, the less i can decipher, i’m piling unread books on my desk, unheard cds and unseen movies on my shelves, and i always come to notice that the only things that do make a bit of sense are the invisible line between a good and a bad image and the mysterious alchemy of the point where it all began again.
when they ask me how work is, i say fine, then i concede, simply great. i grin. just like my life makes any sense to me. just like this post makes any sense at all.

soundtrack : REM – the outsiders