A love letter

Film made 2023, write up for DREAMERS looking back from 2026

Right down to my bone marrow, I am a romantic.

Words are too slippery for certain things.
I continue to try to wrap words around that home, 138. Try to wrap words like warm rags around the bricks and mortar, the soft bodies, the cradling, the spillages, the mop ups and the love.

Put simply, it was a house share – but of course, nothing is only its bones.
And I don't look now at the remains of a distant and unidentifiable ribcage, saved in a box gathering dust.

I fleshed out the time, the memory, bit by bit; with photos, sound recordings, videos and writing.
Layer upon layer, smoothing into each other.
I documented our everyday, every day, over and over and over.

Like a doting lover or a devoted mother, I traced the lives of the women I lived with for four years before we were evicted.
I collected treasures in the mundane, living in an all consuming platonic love 
A nostalgia for the present moment
Somehow knowing, like a father of the 90s obsessively camcorder zoom recording childhood, that this was completely transient
And completely precious.

There's something in photographing someone in the tender, the intimate, the vulnerable.
Something sacred between two people.

I read once
That it was believed that having your photo taken would take a part of you 
A part
An essence
Or some may call it soul
It would steal this in a single click

Steal a part of you that you hadn’t even seen yourself
After a lifetime of only seeing your own jaded reflection

I read once
That the power of the camera was enough to steal something intangible
I think I disagree
Or think there was a misunderstanding
To me, I wonder - perhaps, instead
Someone momentarily gives the photographer a part of their soul
Lets themselves be held in another's hands
Seen through another's eyes
Momentarily, they are gathered in
Cradled in the arms of someone that wants to know you, wordlessly
All this, This passing between two, could we say
Is then soaked into the photograph, just as the shutter coughs
Saturated in all this, the photograph holds this moment of trust
The soul is not taken through this exchange, but held and returned with a thank you and a light squeeze.
No parts are severed but instead a copy, a ghost, a trace of the moment exists now.

Could we agree to
Not steal
But promise to heal
To show the person the magic you see

In a way photography attempts to make things more permanent than they are
Sometimes I expect it to do this better than it does

But it immortalises in a way
A curious indirect way
Like
A fingerprint
Or two letters carved into a tree
A fossil
A stain

Or a sentence you'll never forget

A love letter transcribed:

We met at a party, 3 and a bit years ago,
You were golden curls and piano songs.
We met on the grass, in the sun,
Over chip stixs and tinnys in the park,
I laughed when you said a dog passing by was good looking.
We met in a carpark in IKEA,

The first time it was just you and me
We listened to drum and bass and told each other our darkest secrets.
We met by a river on a cold day, both braving the water,
I made a weird comment about Draco Malfoy that I over thought,
Your accent was like butter.
We met in a bath,
3 side by side, talking about nothing.
We met in the sun, naked in the garden,
Over tea and poems and tears.
By now we've met many times over.
I sometimes meet a new you.
It can catch me off guard,
The you that said you wanted to learn to act,
Or the you that isn't scared of the dark anymore,
Or that you that said you’re braver now.