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.