March 2023


Erik and I outside Paragon
Mom and Dad and Clyde, Brighton 14th
Tully at Clandestino
Noah and a friend of Alina’s
Emma Safir at Blade Study
Blake and Brooke, Blade Study
A stranger whose condiment jar lid flew off
Emilio
Emilio and Alina
At Clandestino
My beautiful mother
Mom and Clyde
Brighton Beach
In the beginning of March I’d written that piece of writing in my phone and later made some finishing tweaks to it. February had brought the reopening of old wounds. So I begged not to be bent so much as to break. And besides this- to be a force of good, to effect things around me beautifully, or to at least take photographs. I felt fragile. I flitted around the city to bars and functions with my camera around my neck and forced myself to be around others, sometimes having conversations at only 80% attention because the other 20% was somewhere else, anxious, searching. I wonder how many people thought I was an idiot during these encounters.
This would continue until April. I smoked, I drank, laughed with the gang. One night we left Mister Fong’s and climbed the fire escape of a nearby building because I implored everyone to get to a rooftop. Tucking one of many collins glasses full of gin and seltzer from Fong’s into my peacoat pocket, we climbed up four floors only to find the ladder didn’t reach all the way up to the roof edge. We climbed back down, drunk and jolly and undeterred. I convinced everyone to go to the beach. So in the middle of February, an hour and fifteen minutes later we clicked down the boardwalk, night smelling like brine, bitter wind occasionally gusting in our faces, breaking up the wild quiet. Walking with Emilio and Zach, I told them how different this place is in the winter. Eerie and beautiful, temporarily hollowed of its pulp.

On the 13th Franklin died. Franklin was a tiny dog that changed my life and possibly even saved it. A note I wrote the week after:


  • Freelancers dig graves.

  • My mother called me from work to ask how I was doing. Her voice was really quiet. I told her I was finished.

  • Thirty minutes earlier in the wooded area behind her house in Pennsylvania, I dug a grave for my dog.

  • Snow fell but only softly. I wore the only boots I have that could weather the mud. One time someone I love cleaned them for me. He did it in silence. Diligently, carefully. I don’t know why this memory is particularly strong.

  • I thought about the ways we pour ourselves through our hands. “Labor of love”, 
  • etcetera.

  • Breathing heavy, I thrust the shovel through frozen roots to get the grave just right for his tiny body. 

If I could barely hold myself together, I hoped to be of use to others. In company, in jubilation, or at least in being a prism that they could shine through, etched into the emulsion on my film.