COMING BACK TO MYSELF

I open the window. I step away and photograph. I photograph and write to search for myself, perhaps to find myself. I photograph and write to survive.

It is March 2020. My trip to Europe lasts barely two days. I have to go back home. The return is long, thick, unreal. Face masks, gloves, and the anxiety in people’s eyes take over everything. The world seems to come to a stop while something invisible advances.

A camera, notebooks, and pencils are all I have. Photographing and writing become a way of resisting. A precarious way of holding on to sanity in the face of chaos.

These Polaroids emerge in silence and from the ghosts of an illness. From confinement, from isolation. From the loneliness of the void. From suspended days. While everything was disappearing.