Thoughts

A photograph is one second of one breath of one’s life, frozen.  A glimpse, just from the outside. We see a shell, a flash without substance. It can speak to us and yet says nothing at all.  The picture can be taken without the subject even knowing or remembering.  Violence, beauty, death and judgment.  All in a single frame. 

It feels powerful to have a camera in my hands.  It’s always been this way.  I think even before I had a camera I saw life through the lens….still images..caught on the film of my mind, suspended …with me, viewing them at a distance…an observer in my own life. Frozen and alone.

Even my memories are like snapshots that I am viewing with a critical eye.  I am the subject in the picture but somehow I feel detached from the image. I can look back and see this young girl, maybe around seven, climbing a huge oak tree, for example.  She has a book and a blanket tied to a rope that she is hauling up into the tree with her.  She keeps climbing until the branches are close enough together were she could sit jammed in between them…looking out over the neighborhood….reading her book.  She sits up there for hours until her legs go numb.  The breeze rustles the leaves…she feels completely peaceful. She feels safe.  And alone.

I am the girl.  I recognize her face in my memories as my own face, my own hands holding on as I am climbing the tree, yet I feel as though I am watching her from a distance…she is framed behind glass and hanging on the wall in front of me.  The label on the wall just below her reads

“Sarah- age seven, climbing the oak tree in the front yard of her childhood home”.

I think my total detachment for life started with my name. It feels like a name that should apply to a small, lovely creature.  Shy and demure. With a lovely voice and a laugh like bells tinkling. Needless to say, that’s not me.  Or at least that isn’t how I feel.  I kinda wish my name were Roxy.  Maybe my life would have turned out different.

But knowing me, even with a name like Roxy, my life would have been exactly the same. Riddled with mistakes and ugly photographs.  Or at least it seems that way to me. 

I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel not completely myself. Not real.  I spend whole days not really feeling real. My mind will flit over and under, around and through a subject, a memory, a fear, a thought and never ever really land.  Almost like a hummingbird.