Tonight's nostalgia. 🌹
Anastasia holds a lot of wonderful memories for me. Glowing flashbacks of my childhood, steeped in a tea of golden retrospect and flecked with russian blue.
Dragging my parents and long suffering grandparents to watch it with me - thrice - in the soft quiet plushness of the cinema. Mouthing every word of every song in the darkness. My granddad's hilarity. Asking my grandma if I could call her "grandmama" like Anastasia did, and her bemused assent. How that fizzled out after a while because it was too much of a mouthful. Spending countless hours on the dial-up modem obsessively researching Angelfire websites about the Romanov family. Their stoic beauty in black and white. The terrible end. The conspiracies. A forgetter named Anna Anderson. Telling everyone in school that because my middle name was Nicole, I (sorta) had the same middle name as Anastasia Nikloaevna Romanov. Finding friends to be my Olga, Tatiana, and Maria.
Fast forward to twenty something year old me: @thejoshfather gifting this music box to me for my birthday. It was small, precious, perfect. A russian treasure. Everything I thought it would be. The lullaby of my childhood. Me buying 2 Together in Paris necklaces for my gran(dmama) and I. I guess it won't be Paris, now. I guess it'll be Heaven. I'd like to think the streets will be equally as chic, the evenings as golden, that Heaven smells like fresh baguettes in the morning. Her hand, reaching out to me from the mist of sunlight I blink my eyes against. Calling. Welcoming. My childhood lullaby, drifting from an angelic music box that no longer needs winding.
