January 28, 2020 @ 6:32PM
It is the small things that slip away in the midnight of your brain that really show just how affected you are
by what has happened.
Of course, you have your loud moments. But when it has been a while and those loud moments don’t happen so
often, we get too comfortable. We forget and invalidate the small significant things that in turn has us
brushing off our shoulders of the mildew and grime that still reside on them.
January 10, 2020 at 11:54AM
A while ago I threw myself onto the kitchen floor. I don’t remember the step by step. There was just me
standing and then just me spread eagle on the cool tile floor. When I remember it, tunnel vision shows me just
me in the room. But if memory serves correct, in those black edges, lived everything and everyone else that was
actually in the room with me.
When I remember that, I can see myself from different angles. And the scenes play out of order in a sort of
cacophony of images. Memories are weird because they’re wrong.
I know exactly, almost exactly, what happened and yet the emotions get intertwined and interpreted in the
actual happenings. They get smeared.
Photographing my family and spending time with them was therapeutic as I flushed all the racing
thoughts onto
the camera. In the beginning, the photographs were heavy with emotion and weighty with a reluctant approach. And,
well, that was a given; I looked towards photography to try to understand the emotions as I painted, splattered
them into each frame. There was a lot of hurt in the beginning. Now, not so much. I have untangled myself. I
have given myself the necessary time to take knot after knot into curious hands, finding open eyes searching
through the tangles. I’ve taken each strand connected to my brother, my best friend, my mother and my father as
well as myself and held each one closer, looking at the frayed ends. I know they hold theirs. I know my brother
has found his. He mends it, retying where it has been worn thin and split. I know he stares in awe of it. He holds
it closer with each passing day. Tightly now, making sure to not let go again.
