Remembrance of Things Past

dress Mojca Makuc, belt Almira Sadar, shoes Tod's

This is one of my favorite dresses not only because of its functionality but also because of its sense of humor - I love the zippers (sometimes I zip them up for about half the length) and the crazy color combinations of threads.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Until I was 15 my family used to spend a couple of months a year at a house here at the seaside just a few minutes up the hill from where we are located right now. Seeing as that house is my number one association to the word "childhood", I've had a strange relationship with it since we stopped going there because when something that valuable for your inner life is (for the most part) taken away, you begin to question everything related to it in order to discover a definite, carved-in-stone truth that you hope will help you adapt to the sudden lack of it as painlessly as possible. In these 4 years my mind slowly recalled, reconstructed and analyzed every single memory: being afraid of going in the lower courtyard as a child because I was convinced a lion would eat me were I to disturb his kingdom unaccompanied by an adult, watching ships and lights with elbows resting on windowsills at night, narrow, steep stairs you could never get the hang of, the smell of lavender after having watered the garden, mysterious paintings in the living room, shortcut leading to the bakery past a brood of hens, stories bordering on occult everyone enjoyed elaborating on whenever they got the chance, the saddest dog in the world, listening to gentle morning rain between crisp white sheets … All pure magic realism the source of which was, I was sure, the house itself.


Neighbors' dog. He died last year after a lifetime of agony.
I went to the house a couple of times this summer with my brother. Happy that I finally had the opportunity to do it, I took a camera with me to capture everything I had been constantly thinking about all these years; however, when we unlocked the doors for the first time, let the light in and took a walk around the entire house, there was suddenly nothing to photograph, as if everything I held so dear never existed at all. It was then that I finally realized what I missed wasn't the house but the time when we inhabited it. It was us, the people, who made it alive, and that feeling can never be recreated because my childhood at n° 87 is long gone, no matter how nostalgic I feel about it.

In a way, I'm content I let it go as – like so many times before – what I yearned for was unattainable. A part of me will probably always wish it weren't, but this new place has many qualities to it as well. If nothing else, I still have the memories – I've learned it doesn't pay off to live off them, but in smaller doses I'm sure they can be nothing but benign.