Self-Portraits, Warm Light, Sun Coming Up

Looking for something through the camera’s eye.

Trying to figure out what it means to be well after being ill, it’s not the same thing as always having been well. There’s going to be some kind of rupture within the smoothness, not unlike sentences begun anew halfway through.

Dress from a former life in a far-off place.

Maybe the trick is understanding I’m a bird that is strange and the colors of my feathers have to be invented without relying on any existing shades.

Makeup from here and there, plus that sore on the corner of my mouth, dry skin, how the toothpaste worries it.

Or, I’m sitting near a window in the streaming morning light, attempting to come up with a theory of what it means to dismantle then reassemble. The body, the mind guiding that body, a kind of jigsaw puzzle. In that even after I manage to fit all the pieces together, I have to live with the knowledge that fault lines exist, the shape may not hold.

Black spilling off black under gold.

Maybe now the situation, going slowly down off the meds, can be compared to these ancestors of dogs racing out of my skirts. To the part of me that’s not tame but still has the capacity to crawl close to the fire. For companionship and warmth.

Hair, always, cross of light.

Writing the history of my body as one human wishing, breaking out of every cage in the world, half-wanting, half-needing to know how long this deep middle calm can, will, hold.