Last weekend Roman and I went to see the McQueen documentary, and outside of getting overall depressed, it made me very nostalgic about my years in Paris. I enjoy gradually forgetting all the bullshit that happened here and there. It's nice, how memory works, filtering the best, the brightest moments. But nostalgia is real, just like in the last verse of Charles Aznavour's La Boheme, where his character visits his old neighborhood and doesn't recognize the walls and the streets, nothing remains of his youth memories "Montmartre semble triste et les lilas sont morts."
Can you trust your own memory?
Felt the same way while visiting Paris for the first time after a five years-long break, especially about Le Marais, with it becoming an LVMH shopping destination... At the same time, there is some level of bitter beauty in the fact that everything's changing. This is partially the reason why I don't feel like visiting Hong Kong any time soon, deep down I know, that it hasn't transformed enough yet. I want to play the "oh, this bar shut down, oh, that building is new" - game. I would prefer to get distracted by this than spend my time walking around Sham Shui Po or Sai Ying Pun and noticing that the only thing that's different is me. I grew older.