Orginal sept 2009

Still futzing with the new camera

With the new camera I’m having difficulty adjusting the obvious light and focus and effects on the fly and am forced to figure it out in edit with software. I don’t remember it being this difficult to figure out! Seriously, when I took photography with a film camera it was slap on a filter or swap a lense… this 800 buttons to push to get the effect you want is making me nuts.

I might have to sign up for a digital SLR class. Damnit.

The Katana

hue/saturation experimpent

I’m standing at the edge of an abyss. Toes peeking over the lip into the absolute forgotten.

Not that I don’t know what is out there or down there or what the vastness contains… because to some small degree I have known it before – back when I was a child-woman.

I knew a version of this before I shaved my head and scrubbed my body with sand. I knew the tinting of this sensation before I took two years of celibacy to erase the yearning for my lover’s touch.

I must have known things better or with more accuracy before I put myself into the big sleep. I must have been aware of these things that seem too foolish to have forgotten – but there it is… I am seeing all as if I have never seen it before. As if I have never felt this raw, this exposed – this visible.

I am unsettled by the way men have been looking at me lately. As though they had no idea I was standing next to them all this time. I am rocked by the glint of fierceness in their gazes and the boldness of their words. They way they shield my body with their own.

Heart hammering, I stand at the edge of an abyss.

There is a pressure from behind me, like my space on the cliff above the vast emptiness of forgotten is shrinking. My footing getting ever smaller and any minute there will be nowhere left to be but – falling.

And I will remember what it is that I have forgotten. And what I have tried desperately not to know.

I will know again and it terrifies me…

Because why would I have worked so hard to forget if it wasn’t something terrible?? What was so horrible that I put my mind and spirit and body to sleep for a thousand years? Is it going to kill me? Will it maim? Why have I tried so hard not to remember?

The key is in the way I am being seen. Men’s eyes lingering on my face like they are seeing it for the first time, their words possessing the air in my lungs. It’s in the way they rest a hand on my lower back as they urge me through a doorway or the hidden meaning in their casual inquiries. It’s the way they cup my hip, or press their lips to my neck. It’s in the scent they give and how mine responds. It’s in the crackle between our bodies.

It is a force I don’t recall easily, like the memory of moonlight in the blinding heat of day. A gossamer theory of graceful light. Dreamy. Hazy. Intangible.

What does it mean?

I stand at the edge of an abyss, my footing ever shrinking…

And I have no idea if I will be caught before I hit the bottom.