Photo Freewrite – Week 3

1/15/20

New structures make new shadows and new reflections. New hours make new weather. The building that took too many years to finish sits empty. The snow predicted all week for the valley floor stayed in the mountains. Still, my block and the sky around it shook a bit of glow and sparkle, in thanks for our patience.

1/16/20

For one whole minute: All land an island. All sea the blue sea. Swim above the whitest sand and below the sunniest sun. Let your body believe it, best it can.

Come back. Crouched above the moss on a highway overpass. Hair full of chlorine and 37 degree rain. But at least the swim is real, held in your hungry limbs.

1/17/20

The thorn has to be a thorn even through the winter when there’s nothing to protect and no one to scare away. All it can do is invite a bit of lichen and moss to latch on and snuggle in. All it can do is be a gathering place for rain. That is enough.

1/18/20

I can’t find fault with the tagger who chose this dirt and moss encrusted scrap of concrete as their canvas. Maybe they knew that nature would wear away their neon mark, but at least it wouldn’t get painted over. It would fade and crumble like a ruin. Like something that used to be important.

1/19/20

Some will tear through nearly two decades of advertising and protests and tags and stickers and art. Others will patch the tears with more of the same. In the end, what arises is an ever-changing monument to all that is fleeting.

lethality…choose free…cannon fodder…inform cult

Kook of the day…Casa Alvarez…Chy Thai Cuisine

I was here. No, I was here. No, I was here.

1/20/20

The winter sun came out to play, bringing with it two boys on skateboards in shorts and t-shirts. And the bearded face of the man usually half hidden beneath a stained hood. And the crow’s blue-black sheen as it explores the mud and wind-blown garbage collecting in front of my house. And the face of new ivy on my neighbor’s fence, remembering it comes with a thing called gloss.

1/21/20

The plant in the therapist’s office glows in the sunlight, even its furred edges. The name of the plant escapes me even though I’ve looked it up at least three times. I have the same problem with the word insouciance, a word my mouth adores, but one whose definition I’ve forgotten for years, over and over. Kind of like the way I need to hear love every day as if this life were inscrutable without a label.