SO*CAL

End of 2011, BTK App. Bill Kaulitz is standing in front of the camera with his iPhone in his hand, while wearing a Southern California cap. 

The symbolic value of this image is indescribable.

He's probably supposed to look cheerful, but instead he displays a weird facial expression that's impossible to trace... just like the reason he's wearing that cap in the first place.

Was he wearing it as a sign of love for his new land? Or was he wearing it as a bizarre form of silent protest that only he could understand? Perhaps it had just been given to him by his handlers and he was forced to wear it with advertising purposes. Or perhaps, at that point of his existence, he was too dead inside to even care.

Or was it just Photoshop all along? Given the size of his head and the apparent absence of neck, it's the most probable thing... but, at this point of my existence, I'm too burned-out to even care.

Thankfully for us, this is the closest thing we've ever had to a Bill Kaulitz mug shot. The only real difference is that, instead of holding a placard with his information written on it, he is holding that goddamn iPhone that displays the cover art for his (and his brother's) one-year sentence of LA imprisonment. 

It's all there. Everything you need to know, in one single image.

If you look underneath the So Cal cap, you'll see there is still a hint of eye-liner around his eyes (apparently, he kept wearing it during his first year of reclusion, before he stopped using make-up completely); still a hint of beauty underneath all the layers of LA mud.

Strange as it might seem, there was a certain feeling of presence in a few of the App's first shots (manipulated or not) that quickly started fading away, just as the people who starred in them kept drifting away from reality and into non-existence. That's probably the reason why those few first pictures still hold a strange kind of iconic value that was impossible to recreate in all subsequent Ebel-shots. He might own their words and their history, but he can never replace their souls (not that their fans need them, anyway). Even at their most damaged, their spirit was still a flame. But this room has been cold for more than two years already.

Now that I can finally see through the pain, things are becoming increasingly blurred in my head. I have a hard time preserving their memory; seeing them as living things while they are only existing as ghosts. Their history starts feeling like an ancient myth; a collection of hardly believable events that never happened in our conventional reality. What's left of their tortured bodies decomposes into legend, as the memory of all the dirt we had to dig through (and I say we because we did it together) during all these last years becomes the distant echo of a nightmare; the horror of LA fades into grey, as the reality of their existence inevitably disappears from my reality.

All of a sudden, I find myself able to dig through the paparazzi material that used to send me into panic attacks and heavy paranoid trips back in the day. Perhaps it's because now I know how much of that (and to which degree) was an act in front of the camera; perhaps it's because I'm no longer as emotionally dependent on them as I used to be. Perhaps it's because I've grown so used to living without them existing in my life I can't even imagine how things would be if they actually returned.

And, as I accept the fact that I might never see them again (or that they might not be the same them the next time I see them), I'm left feeling a strange kind of peace... and I just don't know how to feel about it.

I haven't given up my hopes for them. I guess I've just grown used to things being the way they are.

That's probably what happens when you've finally reached the stage of Acceptance.

...

California, I'm fine

Somebody check my brain