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Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: "Come with me, Milena. We are going to love eachother without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow." Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.
( Letters to Milena / Franz Kafka )
✶
When the Gods were crafting Jess Mariano, resident city boy, stringing him together thread by thread from the basket of spare parts, they fused the strands of his DNA with culture. They were doused in music and art, wrapped around the lampposts of New York, wrung out and doused again. He was made to drown it in; to consume it all, layer by layer, for what it is and what it was meant to be. Break his ribs and they will make art. They are the wind chimes on the porch. He is the ribbon in the mixtape, the passion that paves the way.
The Gods had built him for the bustling streets. For the five-dollar delis and the hotdog stands. The yellow cabs in ceaseless flow. He was moulded together with the city in mind: an amalgamation of dreamers and cynics, painters and poets, like mismatched mosaic glass framed in the windows of a church. Where sinners and saints cultivate the art that defines what it means to be alive.
New York City was a part of him, and he, it. It was symbiotic, almost.
That was until his mothers neurosis reared its ugly head and off he was swept into the awaiting unhinged jaws of Stars Hollow.
Small towns will swallow you whole, tongue against wobbling tooth, if you let them. Haunted houses built on hallowed ground, bursting at the seams with mindless conformity. The patrons are more faceless phantoms, barely above ground, vessels for a hive mind, than they are people. They're intangible spectres of conventionality, refusing to stray from tradition. From heritage. Refusing to put down roots of their own to accommodate the daunting, outdated trees from way back when.
Stars Hollow had long sunken its razor-sharp teeth into the arm of Robyn Kazansky: local girl too big for her armour.
When the deities were sculpting her, stringing together fragments with straining, double-knotted thread, they had the sun and camera film in mind. An orange vinyl couch and the recipe for nonconformity in a space that would not allow for it. Her blood was wired to the unrelenting rythm of an unclear melody. Open a vein, she would sprout rolls of film and blood-embellished carnations. They had intended to carve into her a frenzied passion for the camera, the lens, the immortalising medium, something that fell short in the realm of a small town, a gilded gossamer cage.
