THAT VIRGIN MOON, THAT LOVING SKY, A SHALLOW HEART OF UNFEIGNED CONFIDENCE
2023 JAN 13
1. These days I am only concerned with telling things that have happened. Waiting on the sun-splotted screen porch as the sunscreen dries. Waltzing on snowy beaches. The whistle of wind, sitting in apple tree branches. A commitment to something beautiful: a life well lived. Frozen eyelashes. These photographs are not invested in describing a narrative or an event so much as they are poetically relating to one another, especially on the basis of what each reveals and obfuscates. In transparency and opacity—darkness and vividness—calling out for one another. Through each of them, I am making a wish inclined toward the sacred, ethereal, elegiac, and unknowable. Four white violets.
2. I am eavesdropping on my life, as if it were not my own. I am piecing together what I can gather. Glimpsing images as if they were passing words. Saturated colors. Tangled digital fragments. Dark, blurry, barely visible. Collapsing. The folly of a nondescript existence reaching outward. I am refusing indulgence of the bleaker, colder things. Delicate. A relentless optimism. A view through teary eyes of life’s gleaming, hallowed light.
3. This is for every moment I’ve been curious. For every moment I’ve turned to image-making, wordsmithing, I have been caught between escapism and creationism. Am I running? Am I changing my life as it stands? Is there a difference? I want to awake in my bed tired but truthfully. Open my eyes to the image of my ceiling and feel relief. Welcome back: you are still yourself.
4. Endless days spent in damp towels wrapped round my august skin. The light on the island right before it falls slowly behind the trees. Grass has never felt as good and I am stepping out of the shower every day with a new sense of self.
5. You can see through my bedroom window each of those drifts caught on the church's roof and their slow falling, as if continents. I remember that wonderful dust of a snow day. But I am against parsing out and recounting the pieces of my life. Better to let each of these memories gather and fall like snow off of the church roof. I will stop living on the page. None of this is life. Not the words, not the photos. Fantasy cannot save me and I will proceed to be embarrassed. This is me renouncing all my attachment to bravado. Now I will practice being relentlessly timid. I put my arms tightly around myself and recall the following images: Grandma in the car. The beaver pond next to her house. Morning nosebleeds in Mama’s old bathtub. Pennsylvania. Strip-mall window shopping. Joey’s birthday. Willow sitting on the porch. A reflection on your childhood living room through your childhood’s glass frame. A vivid feeling of the past you can’t articulate but every so often feel, for moments, everywhere. “Isn't it so lonely in the heart of the house? Isn't it so lonely in the house without music? Isn't it so lonely if the music turns to darts? Isn't it so lonely if the darts have you as target? Cut your dresses. Cut your teeth on your good shirt. Make your bed but don't regret its lack of beauty. There is more than beauty that you're after. Leave the house. Forget the music. There's a new light in the darkness.” [1]
6. Everything is going to be okay.
7. There’s no more magic. But there are still pink socks, dark chocolate, kitchen flowers beside morning coffee, people who make you laugh, happy tears. I don’t think any of that is restrained hoping. For every ounce of cowardice there are sweet strawberries. If this text is just the antics of youth, I will relinquish it all with an unapologetic grin. Thank you that vengeful moon, that loving sky, Thank you shallow heart of unfeigned confidence, lingering promises, Thank you beautifully unfulfilled dreams. Dark sky open up on me. I’m not dressed for this. Still, I’ll smile and laugh.
8. “You know already having photographed this material, and having catalogued what you left behind, what is almost always left behind, wherein the alchemist searches for her completeness in the trace material of residuary apartness, what you have written you have written, now open your mouth and sing.” [2]
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[1] Virgo horoscope. May 3, 2021
[2] Rick Moody, to Alex Nelson