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How a misunderstanding comes to be:

thrown
caught
suspended
adrift
confused
unsure
collided
repelled
enticed
given up
intrigued
pulled in
thoughts
and words
on paper
on lines
made
meant
- was meant -
but not now

WANT.

I want what I can’t have?
I have things I don’t want?
I think I want things I don’t want?
I want things I’m not brave enough to go after?
I want things but look in the wrong places?
I want things I know I shouldn’t want?
I think I shouldn’t want the things I want?
I pretend I want things I don’t want?
I don’t know how to obtain the things I want?
I don’t know how to maintain the things I want?
People misinterpret my communication of what I want?
I change my mind about what I want?
I know what I want but I don’t have access to it?
I go after inadequate substitutes of what I want?
My wants are a product of my circumstance and therefore are superficial wants?
I am quickly dissatisfied once I receive my wants?
What is a ‘want’?

(If you say a word over and over again it starts to sound silly.)

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

time

Dearest stars,

I am writing to you about ‘Now”.
‘Now’ is not the same for you and me,
you see.
Your ‘Now’ is much more immediate than mine;
Because I have mortal existence
I have consciousness.
Consciousness does not register ‘til
After the fact.
Therefore
‘Now’ is not now.
Once I realise something that is ‘Now’ the
Moment has in fact already passed.

You are not conscious however.
You are defined only by my ‘Now’,
But your ‘Now’ is different to mine.
For you
‘Now’ is any given instant
you choose to exist.
For me it is stolen
Snatched
The second I dare to claim it.
But the ‘Now’ we share
Has length.
You are you
And I am conscious of this.
But not until after the fact.

So really,
Stars,
YOU exist
And I do not.

black friday

Beautiful people wear glitter in their hair. They sew rips into t-shirts and smoke cigarettes from other peoples’ hands. They cut themselves with champagne bottles and make red-stained mosaics in not-quite-set footpaths.

Beautiful people don’t know they are beautiful. They wear mismatched earrings and junk around their wrists. Beautiful people see angels in white-clouded rooms - a sweet-sour smell. They know they’ll never be blessed.

Beautiful people speak words everyone else can hear but no one dares think. They make jokes other people miss or wish they’d gotten. Wish they’d opened their eyes to feel. Beautiful people can never exist alongside other people because they’ll always fuck them up.

Beautiful people test the edges of painted lines. They wonder what it’s like to cross to the other side. They forget how metal feels, or else they’ve never felt it, or they remember what cold is like. They know how good it is to crash.

Beautiful people know what it’s like to be ugly. They are deformed, inside out. They bear scars and marks and creases, some self-inflicted, some not. They wish they knew how to eat.

Beautiful people forget how to write. Occasionally it comes back to them. But there are always spelling mistakes. And punctuation marks.

We can’t all be beautiful but we wish we could.


Beautiful people don’t tell you they are leaving. They simply stand up and pursue their whims. Beautiful people wake up later than us. They’re busy wandering other spheres. Their hair is defiant and takes on strange angles. They bear imperfections which taint the rest of us. They say exactly what they mean. They reshape your lips and make your eyes go heavy and can’t understand why.

Beautiful people don’t touch other people. It seems unnatural to them to be amongst broken bodies. They can’t bear to see limbs which are sewn together. They don’t know how to behave like we do. They are different. We are something they are curious about but which they can’t reason.

Beautiful people are so alluring .. you will always be made to watch from a distance. You can never touch them. You were born more broken than they’ll ever be.

angel kisses

It’s Better to Trust in Strangers than to Stumble with Friends

In the days when I wore my hair up
someone was drawn to me.
Marks and all
he kissed me in my entirety.
In my youth stains of colour were “alright ay”.
We made shapes in the sand dunes, carving out hollows like tandem sculptors.
I’m sure he sampled others
ambitious and bright.

In the days when I wore my hair up
not covering my face
he saw other parts of me: beneath denim shorts
my legs; the flat outline where hips were yet to flourish; my tiny
waist still favoured by my youthful metabolism.
I think he knew -
Sorry, said I –
that I knew nothing,
but that I could invent everything in an instant
with his creative consent.

If I were to walk the graveyards
of windy Wellington streets
I might find him in a corner rolling Peter Jacksons
or perched on rubbish bins
or working in trades;
or I might not.
He could live four lives
or one.
He might not recall
six of the thirty-nine girls he has fucked.

But I know one thing for sure: it’s likely he has
forgotten me.
If my wrist cut his on a pedestrian crossing
he’d never recognise me.
Because at eighteen I wear my hair down
and at God-knows-what-age he still
lies about the truth
without sin nor guilt.