reading © Lilly Schwartz

Traveling means waiting. Killing time, reading, listening to music, eating, just so that the time passes. This man reads while waiting for the train. I took pictures of him while waiting for the train. For Christmas my family usually meets at my mum’s place in Chemnitz, where we all used to live. Only my mum lives there now and like most people who left Chemnitz, the rest of us have no plan of returning to this town. I don’t really know how it is now, but when I lived here it seemed as if there was nothing. Province. Even the gothic parties I used to go to were quite provincial in tastes. It’s as if the rest of the world moved a bit faster and had a better taste in music too. Every year we still come back, although we don’t do the old stuff anymore. We don’t go to the same parties, we don’t necessarily meet with the same people and when we do it’s sometimes shocking. Last year I ran into an old friend of mine at a party and was shocked that I ever considered him a friend. I don’t think he changed much. I changed. And that’s generally what going away does to you. It changes you and when you come back everything seems odd, precisely because it all stayed the same.