Colin started filming one day, conversations mostly, even the drunken ones at the pub. He claimed that it would help us record our ideas, for the future, yet no one went back to the tapes, at least not at first. He thought, perhaps, that filming our day-to-day activities, our blind wanderings, gave us a feeling of importance, of the fact that we were doing something and it really was a serious business.
…The first memory should be something about his fingers when he was passing me a pencil, I think, for it was as close as we came to touching at that time. It was a rather intimate experience, for a boy of 11, to stand in the presence of someone who awoke such feelings of longing and ache. I was disturbed by these sensations; by the images my addled mind presented me with, at random moments it seemed. Out of lack of knowledge I dreamt of the most peculiar ways of touching, and felt guilty about my fantasies, disgusted to the point where I avoided him at all costs.
Mundane memories are buried somewhere in our minds, disturbing thoughts are trampled on; I thought I had a story of myself figured out by the time I was 18 and it fell apart in the next couple of years. What seemed ordinary before became a mind-boggling experience, and fantasies deemed vulgar before were reduced to nothing more but childish affections. Turning over the forgotten memories and putting them in perspective allowed me to understand my life a little more; I promised myself to stop suffering from a delusion that I was following a path I carefully laid out for myself. I did, I think, begin to understand my situation at that point.
I confronted Thom about the note he’d given me a year before, catching him off-guard on a way home after a long night. He stopped for a second to look at me amazed and laughed loudly into the empty street before shaking his head. I pursued the topic, however, and was asked to fuck off; I did so, bitterly.
He came to me a week later in a shirt he’d worn four years ago to talk about the note. He had thrown me off by that shirt, for I remembered admiring the way it contoured his shoulders when I was 15. Yet my thoughts were fleeting at that time, quick as my eyes when they skimmed his torso, so that no one would question my interests, not even myself. As a tribute to my scared self four years ago I allowed my fingers to glide over the material and fondle his collar; the 11-year-old boy in me was thinking all sorts of clumsy things, yet I pointed out to him that Thom had closed his eyes and was breathing audibly, and that meant that everything was alright.
I hoped I was in synch with Thom that time, that his past thoughts and wonderings were muted by his present self. I thought of him at 14, panicking and miserable, and I hoped that I was taking his hand, too. Some fantasy of a boy fulfilled in the future; some memory recovered from the rubble of shame.
When I was young I stared at the camera and thought that it had me figured out; I saw Colin, 20 years after, watching the tapes and frowning upon my thoughts. I started to understand later that the camera did not capture anything; rather, it provided a guide for me to remember things that were left unrecorded. It is not the conversation we had on our way home that was eternalized on tape; it was Thom’s unfinished pint, appropriated by Ed, and Colin’s concern about my whereabouts.
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Goes splendidly with The Beginning
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