Me & My Sheep

Here are some scans. My face is the same, but this time I have a small sheep. My sweet son. Scanning with the "new" scanner (which is now not new at all) still feels fundamentally different in some ways. I still miss the old one. But here we are with different options, time to move around, wiggle around in a different world. Same as it ever was. Sometimes with all the changes that come it still feels as if fundamentally everything is the same, forever. But then, I guess there's plenty of old things I don't remember at all, so it's hard to evaluate, really.

There's something weird about being the same person, remembering small things from my childhood, or the fact that the foundation of choice for me and all my friends in the mid-2000s was Dream Matte Mousse, that neat little pot with its prevalence in all our weird school rucksacks, clinging on to a specific time and memory. I guess I was that person. Once the foundation gets all scooped out of that little pot, I'm in there. A little creature.

I love change a lot. Things that are new, or dipping into something new, making something else, winking at a new friend with a new joke. It's kinda scary to be the same. Maybe I should try to like being the same more. Being the same as the ten year old girl with a bowl cut and blue combat trousers and a t-shirt featuring characters from Disney's Atlantis. Maybe I should watch Atlantis again. That same Ponyta appreciator who found a Ponyta card on the ground while crossing the road. That same adolescent of an age long forgotten, watching Brief Encounter for the first time on FilmFour by accident and being struck by its raw conveyance of suffering and restraint and connection, the rapid arrival and departure of the trains at the central station such perfect metaphors for sudden love and stark sacrifice - things abundantly, hurriedly given and ripped away.

Every time I watch that movie it feels like it has a newness to it, and an old familiarity all at once. It's everything that way. It's the same, and I feel that same profound sense of rawness each time. Maybe a little differently, but still always the same. A paradox. An overlap.

But still, I'm not my favourite movie. Maybe, somehow, I can see life a little bit more like a movie that way, though. I guess most movies, to me at least, diminish in appeal on subsequent viewings. The idea of looking at my past self is a bit like that to me - or I'm afraid it is. I often think I'd like to forget who I was, in one way or another, but who I was is who I am. We're the same. Two colour channels on the same image.

But it's also true that I have this sheep. A beautiful new sheep. Or at least... it was new at Easter.

Remembering

Sometimes I like thinking about the organisational mechanics that would take place after I die. Maybe this is partly because I love watching true crime YouTubers (specifically Stephanie Harlowe, and sometimes Georgia Marie) and the way they meticulously go through the histories and daily movements of the people involved. I like to imagine someone describing my life, my stuff, my relationships, etc, with the same considered voice. Here's a story pieced together through objects and movements, and other people's memories. I imagine someone going through all the things I own and gathering an idea of who I am. There's something calming about it. What can you make of me through all the files on my computer? Am I an interesting person? A good one? Or am I just a jumble of things? It's a really compelling thought to me.

I was looking through an account I use periodically for file storage, and I found these old photos. A black and white film I put in my old Diana Mini to shoot, apparently, blurs and flowers. Some distorted, cute, and cared for memories, placed neatly into a folder and saved for later. Sometimes I want to burn all these things. Imagine deleting all of your files, getting rid of all your belongings, maybe deleting your memory entirely. Wipe yourself clean. It's not possible for a whole person, but it is possible for files, which is kinda fun. Still, you're always "who you are" I guess, and that's a strange thing to tangle your thoughts around sometimes.

How have I been a person for so long? It seems like everything is always changing so much. Putting myself together in my mind like a puzzle piece from old memories and artefacts, yeah, it kinda makes me worry - am I really someone worthwhile? Can I trust my memories/experiences/beliefs? Who is this weird little person? Maybe I don't know myself any better than someone would looking back on disjointed evidence of my life. Maybe that's a good thing.

Anyway, check out these photos from 2016 - a thousand years ago, before I rose from the lake one misty night.