the star of every moment.

Andrei e-mailed another photograph of me from that day the count came to visit us.

Andrei's in love with his camera. says he's gonna be the new Steven Meisel. says I'm to be his muse. says he's gonna show the world true beauty.

"Aurora, you're the star of every moment," he purrs against my skin with the camera two inches from my chest, making his best Andy Warhol imitation.

trapped once more.

the Rovanows are downstairs with the rest of my family, drinking tea in the Giuseppe sofas my mother had imported from Venice last week. mother envies the Rovanows' perfect and well-polished daughters. they've been playing Chopin the whole morning and now mother keeps sending the maid to come and get me, insisting on that I play La Campanella. "Miss, they are all waiting for you," says the maid with a broken English behind my locked door. "Your mother wants you downstairs immediately."

She knows I can't play with an audience. She knows - still she keeps sending the maid to come and get me. "All those piano lessons, Aurora, all those expensive piano lessons - and for what?" she said the last time the Rovanows came over for lunch.

"You should be grateful - do you even realize how much you have?" says my mother, the materialist, but she keeps forgetting that all I ever wanted was to learn how to play the guitar, and that she kept refusing, saying that the guitar certainly wasn't something nice and well-behaved girls wasted their time on.

Merry Christmas everyone
Aurora

drops.

we're currently at Catalena's place, playing under water.

Pina Bausch: 1940-2009.

love

listening to Sigur Rós this morning. this'll be a great day. we'll drink plum wine and take baths together.

on how to stare at your plate.

blouse, Hermès. rose, from mother's garden.

pointless dinner party after dinner party.

child, you're strange, whispers the baroness's eyes across the dinner table, but I'd rather be strange than forever ordinary.
the evening progresses; I sit immobile as my sisters charm the rest of our guests.

at the Roosevelt.

do you see the sun, Andrei?
invitation after invitation on Facebook (add me darlings), but I hate clubs. bodies filled with alcohol; minds as empty as the shot glasses in front of them. thinking they understand life (still no one noticed the lost boy in the corner). we're at the Roosevelt and Hollywood never smelled more sour. money being tossed like the gravel found in your shoe.

the clock is coming to its end. Andrei takes my hand, leads me towards the back door.
we exit gracefully, forever trapped in a hiphop world.

nothing

I'm not sure what you mean when you ask me if I'm a writer. I don't even know what a writer is.

father's back from Berlin. sister no. 2, the thin one, telling stories about her magnificent life while I watch quiet, my head bandaged. she'll be attending Yale next year. mother's proud; father's happy everything's going so well in our family.

it's good to be back.

Catalena's refined body on early December mornings. she stands for freedom, elegance, and money. undressing slowly to Bird York; daunting the world with her beauty; coloring my room with her symmetry.

supposed to take over her family's business (an only child due to sudden sterility). romanian aristocracy in its most austere form; they never bothered to get to know her.