A few days ago, I sadly lost all the files from a camera I’ve had for four years. It had seen the whip of trees I sat under during my years at university, the hills and abandoned buildings that slipped behind me on my drives home, my little sister and her conversations with imaginary subscribers, the wide blue sea on our rare trips to the beach, bits from our last Christmas with our mother, and the rapture after her passing. I lost it all. I was crushed. Luckily, I was able to rescue a few things by scanning the SD card with data recovery software. It was barely anything at all, so much was still missing from me, but I felt beautiful sifting through these crumbs of me and all I have loved and survived. What I’d managed to save was enough to remind me of the sweetness my life has and will always know, of the unbreakable way my life grabs tight hold of beauty, of the softness nature retains even in times of hardship, how some things never die. I thought I’d write about some of the remaining photographs to lock them deeper into my love.
A beach trip
My only quality
is my razor-sharp memory,
it makes me a good gift giver
it makes me an angry woman
it makes my love deadly.
you needed me to leave you there,
your wing twitching in pain
from my kiss my gift my kiss my gift.
i travelled a long time,
jumbling up the streets i knew lead to you,
until your house started slipping
needle by needle
into the haystack.
i settled on a green hill
and when i looked at my sky
there was the shape of the begging spot
under your front porch light
and on my mouth was the shape of you
razor sharp
tin can 2020
Other files recovered attached to strange doubles of themselves.
Are you there?
The following photographs were some of the firsts I took after the passing of my mother. I found that, in grief, I returned again and again to capture the vast expanse of things. In all these photographs, there is a kind of reaching involved on my part, to the farthest contours of the world, to the inside of the sky. I keep wondering where heaven is, that’s all. I think it’s closer to us than we believe. Just look.
We are never alone.
Not in loving.
Not in grief.