Nhon: I Hope I’m A Son You Can Be Proud Of On Mother’s Day
Assignment: Self-Portrait
Location: Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Shutter: 1/8s
Aperture: f/4.0
On the eve of my last day in the United States I am listening to “This American Life”. The sentimental potency of this show is considerable and I am glad I haven’t caught many of them on public radio. I’ve only heard them by chance as I was driving, though I do understand that podcasts exist. Every week I automatically download “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” for background accompaniment as I walk from place to place. I listen to “Intelligence Squared”, though I hate that title, for its lack of shame about showing smart people getting audibly angry at each other during an oxford debate. I listen to “All Songs Considered” and skip through the ones that don’t start well – because I’m choosy and unafraid of irony. The reason I do not subscribe to “This American Life” is because it is exceptional at what it does. Its stories are frustrating, loving, bewilderingly comical, and strikingly told through narratives and Ira Glass’s monotonic voice. They take such strong hold that I’m usually in complete pieces by the end. I’m two cars at the same time at the same exact space - a goddamn wreck. Some stories end well and some stories do not – they are all melancholic ephemera to me. My personal definition of melancholy states that incredibly depressing things happen and incredibly happy things also occur, but there is only one truth in that paradigm: that’s what its like and we have to find a way to live with how that works. It is knowing that we, as humans, are thoughtful and the rest of existence is not. The rest of it doesn’t know how to care, that our burden and our love are our limited creations - but they are ours. Ours for only however long we have. To keep as we can and to discard as we like. To leave or be left, and on some occasions both. These are the types of things I call melancholy.
So on the eve of my last day in the United States I am looking over my life with a sincere feeling of melancholy. I know that when I step off that plane in London that the melancholy will be gone and so will, to a certain extent, the life I had spent twenty-four years with. One life ends and another begins – that’s what its like and I just have to find a way to live with how that works.
This terrifies me.
Then I realize one important fact: I’m still my mother’s son. This makes me feel okay.
