What does your childhood taste like? Yes, on the tongue!

The Florida Project (2017) is a as much about the precociousness of a little girl, as it is about a world of poverty and homelessness that’s personal to America.

This is thread

This is not a review, it’s a stream of my thoughts after watching this unsuspecting masterpiece.

Most of my growing-up happened at my grandmother’s and that meant hours of playing on the streets. I came from a home and my friends came from sardine tins and matchboxes. They were children of silk weavers who rented a portion of our ancestral property for work and as homes.

We would spent hours foraging for gold (a magnet/ bottle cap) in trash dumps, walk around the town picking up cigarette boxes, repurpose them as playing cards, play hopscotch under the sun tirelessly, dig into the earth like little archeologists, befriend sticks, stones & marbles

... and find new reasons to pick up a fight every single day.

Our playground was the same, but our stories were different. One could tell from the clothes we all wore - I was the odd one out in more ways than one.

Somehow we were all in our own ways reflections of what was happening within the walls of our homes. Moonee, Scooty & Jancey reminded me of that. A certain kind of biomimicry, hostility, attitude/ defensiveness takes over these little children in the film thx to life around them.

How beautiful does ugly get? How much freedom could choicelessness really bring you? The whole time, I kept revisiting the sweaty, dirty, half-toothed smiles of my street friends.

The answer’s both all and nothing.

The film slapped on the consequences of rebellious parenthood and flirted with the truth that love alone isn’t enough. So heartbroken, still holed up in the memory of the goodbye that Moonee managed to, but I couldn’t 16 years ago when I left my friends behind, for a better life.

To a (my) childhood that tasted like wet mud and a melting hailstone on the tongue - for it was with those weavers’ children I had experienced my first and last hailstorm.

To finding our kingdoms anyway. To hoping Leprachauns are nice.

What does your childhood taste like?

FFS...

*is as much about

*This is a thread.

Jesus Christ wonder how I passed kindergarten.

Sorryyyyyy!