Even in Decay
Circa 2012
Compiled in 2024
Photography (B/W) + Text
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I feel good about getting older.
Though I’m liable to wake up with a sore back, and I need to stretch religiously to keep a concoction of pains at bay, I don’t think I’ve ever been healthier. I’m more comfortable in my own skin, and with that comes a peace I never thought I’d experience.
This change might explain the dissonance I feel at times, which takes the form of a kind of static. Friend or foe? My biological shell asks this unfamiliar sensation. The calm, for its part, doesn’t rush to answer. It just sits there quietly, unsure how to articulate what it is or what it’s doing, like a tree growing out of a walk-up’s rooftop—something you only notice if you look up. Out of place, maybe. But alive and doing well given the circumstances.
The person who took these Polaroids was me. But a different me. He would’ve been near the end of his twenties, about to wrap up a difficult decade. If you’d asked him, though, he would have told you he was fine. He didn’t know what else to say. He was, and still isn’t, particularly articulate when expressing feelings. Back then, days would go by when he wouldn’t speak to anyone.
I feel a mix of things when I look at these images now. But mostly, I think about the me that took them. Quietly collecting unresolved grief like he did basketball cards in the mid-90s. Over time, other things began to cling to the grief, whatever was floating around. They found a home in the damp corners of his mind and spread like mould. The weight behind the eyes. The sick feeling of a morning. The nervousness that grew so quietly it took him months to realise it was even there. He’d become so distracted that he couldn’t read. Couldn’t focus on the words. They stopped working. They wouldn’t land.
It’d take years to better understand any of this. But I didn’t know that then. Maybe that’s what ageing is. Learning to carry what you couldn’t name at the time and also knowing what you can put down—what isn’t yours to carry.
I look at these photos now and think, ‘He was still trying.’ Even if he didn’t know what for.