Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Aperture

HÖR ICH DAS LIEDCHEN KLINGEN

Who could have suspected that our lives would turn out so commonplace, especially when to others they appear interesting, and in fact, remind us of everything we fantasized about years ago as teenagers with acne, our lips bristling with down? Our own apartment, accessible sex (at least hypothetically), local fame, first- year students addressing us as “sir,” our parents off to the side like the cars of retired neighbors: theoretically still running but for years parked beneath a canvas tarp. Who could have suspected: our own bank accounts, mortgages, travels, rounds of drinks by pulling out a card—all pleasures forbidden and allowed, laid out like a menu in a luxurious all you can eat restaurant . That brief flash between childhood and old age, between growing chest hair and growing bald, that moment when one’s master of one’s life. But could any of us have predicted those earlier years would take on so much power, attracting us with their distant luster? The long afternoons of our first initiations, conversations about books limited to “you really, really have to read this” because the impressionwas so intense it couldn’t be conveyed by any words or phrases known to us. And love, of course. But more than anything — potential. It was everywhere: it wallowed at our feet, you could trip over it at the crosswalk. Some even threw it from the window, as if it would never run out.

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