Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

I’ve been staring at this for an hour or so trying to untangle why–despite being a shitty image–it resonates with me fucking seismically.

Yeah, I totally get the essence of it. I distinctly remember the feeling of being so aroused that it was painful and my single all-consuming thought being alleviating some of that tension.

And this nails a sort of visual distillation of that experience. But it also reminds me of that line: youth is wasted on the young. I’ve always thought of that as a sort of vampiric sentiment; you know: if only they could figure out a way to bottle that feeling of urgent adolescence, all the things I could do with what I know now!

All the while there are days I’ll not crawl out of bed all day and spend those hours wishing I had a time machine and I could go back and find myself at 19 and have just a few minutes to explain how the fear comes on its own. Don’t borrow it ahead of time, don’t wait on it. Just step out into the void and let yourself fall. Because there’s only falling. It’s not ours but it’s all we’ll ever get.

But I’m not sure I’d listen. Not sure I’d even know how to talk to the myself of so many years ago. And I think if I went back to me at 13, maybe then I’d know what to say. But what could I say: be less afraid to make mistakes because it’s not the mistakes it’s how you respond to them that will define the boundary between who you are and who you want to become.

It all comes down to the simple fact that although it does it shabbily and with less technical acumen that I prefer…this image’s raison d’etre exists in the boundary between where my work is as a photographer and where I want it to go.

The feeling underlying it has something to do with they way I always mishear that Neutral Milk Hotel line as: the miracle of their dark thing.

As has been said: Light is easy to love. Show me your darkness.

And the angles sing: How? What is the appropriate way? I’m trying. I’m trying and failing and falling, always falling.