Photographs

Sometimes it gets really hard just to hold on. To maintain some sort of motivation and not let everything be bogged down by the crude, blemished, disease ridden reality. Shutting out the screaming voices that bounce off your eardrums, always. Shutting out the murmurs and constant drone in the favour of your favourite tune blasting through your headphones. Could those dear songs make forget that life sometimes like a mirage shows false versions of the truth? Defeatism, such a much used word, so powerful on its own, so deadly in its letters, so empty when it stands in the middle of a sentence. These pictures in your head, can you ever be brave enough to show them to me? You say you photograph the insides, that each word is a pixel of another’s soul, mood, emotion. You openly and at the same time secretly dread the idea that you forgot to tell people what you photograph. They tell you, they can’t see. Endless hours turn into fickle traces of burnt paper, dead with just one finger pressing against the other. You say your work is never done. Are we done?

The toil over each sentence, like the discarded clothesline that some foolish geese believed lead to a magical ending, pulls the scent of motivation from her guts, out, out, out. But she is alive and she knows not because her finger bleeds or because she breathes, but because she feels lonely and empty, she feels a deep yearning, a churning of emotions not in her heart but her stomach where no amount of indecency can ever live again. She knows she is alive when she sits crumpled up next to the bathtub, waiting for the water to cover the room so she can float. She knows she is alive when the bread that she tears a piece from never leaves the table but still dances laps around her plate. Where is her home? Who is her home?

You think it all can be undone with one word. When mountains are moved on the inside, when water and cliffs clash and the weak stone leaves itself bare open to the carving and bruising and bullying and finally gives another of its piece to the fearsome ocean. When the fall is met with a cushioned haven that wraps its kind glance like bubble wrap around the unsuspecting fallen victim. She has been building a nest, brought ornaments from far and wide, lined the inside with rose coloured broken images of melodies once sewn to her skin. The seams came undone and she laid them one by one, patch for patch, on top of the branches and their lovely shoots. When the music plays, she paints melodies and imagines paintings of a million colours. She will pick at the thread, she will pick at it at the seams. She will use words to sculpt her broken body and tightened stomach. To make nothing. To live in a dream.

In the end it can be a heavenly day or just another useless collection of empty hours. And now, have you seen a photograph above of a sensation you know you once felt? Read slow. Read again. Has that image been really recorded? I. I try to play with the exposure, the focal length, the colour temperature, the iris and the depth of field. Sometimes it’s a collage. Some other times, it’s a clear picture of a moment that you know to have passed. I’m no longer angry at these words above. I understand that some subjects present themselves hazy even to the best photographer.