Downhill from yourself

When I was at the end of elementary school, I really loved the Clueless series and fell in love with fashion irreversibly, which is why I kept digging through my mom’s closets for hours and hours, though I already knew by heart what I was going to find in them and what I would not find them even if I turn the closet upside down. For hours in my free time, I used to combine things from mere hobbies and love, watch magazines as soon as they were out, save combinations from the Internet into files, and love it the way someone loves football, some medicine, some plumbing, someone working with wood. I loved every detail. Now someone will say that this is because I had a lot of time, but that is not even close, because I went to school in Croatia and they know how to burden every student with unnecessary tasks. I guess that’s why we are having an education reform just now. There wasn’t much time, I was just lucky that I always and without exception knew how to find it for what I loved.

And I know exactly when it goes wrong…

The first time you deny the way you polish your nails, the first time someone tells you to change clothes and you obey them, though you really wanted to go in that first one, when you first come up with an idea and they tell you that there is no chance for it to work and you listen to it, when you trust someone that nothing of the details of a more or less important event matters, because it will all pass anyway. And as Mesha said that long ago and in the Fortress, “Everything will pass. But what is the consolation? Joy will pass, love will pass, life will pass. Is the hope that everything will just pass?”

And the hope is when everything passes, that the way you comb your hair, the way you walk, the way you wear something instead of something wearing you, the way you react when things go out of plan, the way you look at the world, will remain. Things that come to everyone as a fingerprint, like social security number, are unique and exceptional.

About a year ago, I witnessed a situation in my hometown when a girl walked in a tulle dress and two in her vicinity looked at each other and started laughing at her, because there is a committee that has to approve your combination. What sadness, what a misery. I used to be that girl in a tulle dress and almost all of us have been that girl in the tulle dress at least once, metaphorically or literally. So you kind of think that from all this, an adult learns how stupid everything is but to respect someone else’s fingerprints, someone else’s walk, someone else’s ways, someone else’s cloths, someone else’s thoughts. Because when a person loses his or her details and trifles because of others, because of you or me, there is little left for his life. Because man/women does not need anything and nobody as much as he/she needs primarily – himself/herself. With all its details and little things, no matter how ridiculous they might be.