Into Darkness. And back … #3
The other night I sat at my desk. In the dark. And I cried. For reasons I don’t want to get into here, and it didn’t matter really.
What matters for now is that I started the computer, opened Lightroom and looked at the photographs from Normandy. We had been there last fall just before the storms hit. And I knew there would be something there. I had brought back photographs from the beach. Abstracts showing sand and water when the tide was low.
And somewhere in there I found this. And instantly the title came to me.
Where my tears go.
I didn’t know what that meant then. But it felt right. And I started editing the file in Lightroom and later using NIK Silver Efex.
It had to be dark, it had to be timeless. It had to show the textures. But it didn’t need a whole lot of processing. I didn’t need to worry about sharpness that much. This image was full of mood. Of gesture.
And when I was done and sharing it to Instagram, i found the music to go with it as the fifth in the list of suggested tunes. “Reverie” by Claude Debussy.
Listening to the dreamy solo piano and looking at the photograph, with the events of the evening still being felt inside me, I found more words.
“When I sit in the dark and can’t even reach myself, so you can’t either, don’t be afraid. Fear is an old friend and all we do there in the shadows is talk and then he’ll leave.”
Without even realizing it at the time, I quoted Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence: “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” It wasn’t my intention, but it was there and made it to the surface,
So now I look at the photograph, listen to the music and read the words, I can see that moment again. I can see all those moments when I asked myself without any words where my tears would go.
I can see now the transition from right to left. From the firm to the fluid. And back again. I see a connection between those sides and that they need each other. And most of all I see a beauty and therefore maybe a reason to not feel bad about me crying.
I now have this photograph to remember. I have it as a documentation for what was there in my room in the dark with me. I did it right after I felt that. And maybe it meant something that I began doing this months before that evening. Or maybe I have been doing this even earlier. Years ago when I picked up my first camera. Or even earlier. Decades ago.
When I started breathing.
Basically Good 