thursdays the way I like baths

Ok. Picture this: A young girl walks into Rhode Island Design School. The scraggy hem of her dress dances around her ankles. Her whole world is stashed into a brown leather shoulder bag. Flying out wildly behind her, a veil of dirty blonde hair. She reaches the edge of the footpath , I suppose to feel the grass against her soles..

Of course I assumed she was another peace-parading, dope-smoking hippy! Do you blame me?

But you know what, Francesca was intelligent. Emotionally. Aware of everything around her and visually intelligent, too. She took something like 800 photos in the end.

Eight hundred photos. God, that girl - she was obsessed with photographing herself. No, that's not right. She was obsessed with trying to evade the camera. Which never made sense to me because, well, doesn’t that contradict the very act of taking a photo?

I've thought about this a lot actually. I suppose she was trying to make us see something besides herself. Well we missed whatever that was, didn’t we? None of us could see. It must have been important though, because she tried to show us. Eight hundred times.

--

She’s sitting, facing away from the table, knees tucked up against herself, hands clasped together behind her. The ends of her fingers are reaching upwards, searching for the tassles of hair hanging down the back of the chair.

, Francesca whispers at me.

I wonder if Michael does, Betsy

“Does what?” I place the teapot on the table. She stares at the record player in front of us. It’s too low and should be a shelf higher. It causes the music to feel like it's playing from underneath you and I find myself constantly on edge. I worry I might squash the melody by forgetting to mind my feet.

He doesn’t.

“Doesn’t what?” I pour the tea into her cup. She still looks over at the record player, even when I splash a cauterizing drop onto her wrist.

Maybe he does. But not how I love my photos. Or do I love them? I’m not myself here. Oh… She snags a piece of her hair and tugs it out. Does he love me? Or these photos? Because I’m not myself in photos, I’m another person.

“That’s not possible,” I say.

Francesca turns her head around to look me square on. Everything’s possible.

“Who would you be then?”.

Not myself anyway.

And she’s quite sure of that.

Then she brings her hands forward of herself from behind the chair. She looks at the back of her wrist, prods the puffy heel of her hand. A small prick of guilt tags my stomach lining.

Somehow I escape my physicality in photos. It's not me then, I go somewhere else. This is another me. She drops the negative into her cup of tea, then picks it up by the handle. I promise you it’s all true Betsy.

--

I remember the night Michael packed. Francesca had been drinking. From the sofa I could see down the hall into their room, his back hunched over a suitcase.

“Boston!” he cried. “I’m going to Boston. I’m sick of Rhode Island Francesca. All day you hide away in that dingy little room taking photos of yourself...”

Francesca’s very still. She stares at him like the obliging page of a scrapbook: blank. Michael continues packing; she continues being invisible.

“We worked, Ces. But I don’t see you anymore. I just see pictures… All over the house! I go to make a cup of coffee in the morning and the bloody milk has your body plastered over it. Still frames and ink. I don't wanna see photos! I need to see a person. I need to hold a real person, not a two dimensional piece of paper taped to my milk. God..." He tugs at his trousers. "My fucking belt...”

But Francesca is gone. By the time he turns around, suitcase in hand, he’s too late. She’s walked out on him first.

--

Michael. Going to Boston, without me. Forgetting that I was staying at his on Saturday night.

Me, in Rhode Island. Alone. I arrange all the teacups of things he says until I believe him, but the spoons of my paranoia keep clattering. All this ringing inside of my head!

My photos are graveyards. They’re old thoughts and expired ideas rotting on paper. They’re not beautiful. I know this because my folios keep being rejected. And I feel just like my photos: Faded, worn; black and white.

There’s days when I think taking new photos will remind me what happy feels like. But I just become immersed in fog and grey monotones. I need to be a little person who goes where she pleases. Oh, I so much preferred being a child.

The only like mind I had has left. And I don’t feel anything. Literally. Not even sad, just empty. Like Polaroids before images emerge on them. White. Bleak, drained whiteness.

--

So we lost her. Age 22, we lost her. I wish we hadn’t – for selfish reasons mostly, I guess. You know how it is. She’d say to me, Betsy, just quit your stupid job and be my psychiatrist. We’d both be better off. I thought she was joking. Maybe I should have.

On her darkest days she’d mention suicide and I’d say, “Oh, wonderful Francesca! Just leave me here in this shit hole of a world. What am I supposed to do, huh? Come on Ces, you can’t ditch me.” I had to make jokes because what else do you say? Why does one person choose to take their life and another doesn’t?

Based on photographer Francesca Woodman