Mitra > Recent Status Updates

A rambling mess. Matthew I love ya but I can’t do this

Had to switch from book to audiobook because it was insufferable to read

A new favorite already

people took photographs of themselves all day long, in every act and situation, eating their breakfast, sitting on the train, standing in front of the mirror. The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs […] but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.

This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

toward the end of our marriage, only
at the very tail end, it became clear to me that he knew the angles from which he appeared most distinguished and that over time he had perfected a series of appealing looks, glances, expressions and gestures, a trait that was absurd and essentially unlovable

There was nothing elegant or even erotic in the sight of them, their passion was grotesque. […] it was clear that however much of a performance they made of their desire for each other, it was nonetheless the real thing. It was the real thing, and yet I was certain they were aware of how dramatically the light fell on them, how the balcony was framed against the night.