It’s been a month since moving—and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around everything I did leading up to and since. There was an abruptness to it all, like a well‐choreographed tactical strike. Or a daring escape.
It brings me to my last and final Departures post—fitting as I’ve got one last move to complete this weekend before I’m truly finished. The room in my house at the end of the universe has been in the basement, but starting next month I’m getting a loft room in the attic. I’ll have a proper place to write and to work on my other projects, and there is an air conditioner. I’m excited!
After doing a night shoot of CityPlace in Part II, my dad and I went out again at night, but this time we walked around the Financial District and Nathen Phillips Square before heading over to Queen and University. No longer summer the cool October evening turned into a much colder night, and by the end of our walk I didn’t want to change any settings on the camera for it would mean taking my hands out of my pockets.
I like the city during the day. But I also like the city during the night. With my late shifts at work I’ve been getting to see so much more of the city at night, the other city as I like to call it, when whatever can’t be done during the day gets done once it’s dark. I’m reminded of one of the few photographer’s I know—Brassaï—who photographed almost exclusively at night, exploring the city streets and night life of Paris after moving there in 1924. He saw everything—from the high society crowds at operas to the maintenance workers who cleaned out the city’s sewers.
I mostly photograph things. It’s rare for me to include people, and if I have, it’s usually because I hadn’t been able to get the shot without them there. Normally I’ll wait for a frame to clear of people if I can. It’s not that I don’t like people—it’s just they’re often in the wrong place of the picture. That said, there are more people in this shoot than there ever have been in previous ones. It’s hard to avoid them in such a busy part of the city—even on one of the first colder nights of the year.
The narrative is chaotic—fitting, as at the end of this shoot I return home and find myself in the middle of the beginning of the ending of something which, in hindsight, needed to have ended long before it ever started. Yes—chaotic. Such is the nature of gaslighting—you don’t notice the sanity of your life slowly leaving until you’re surrounded by chaos. Or covered in cat scratches.
Yet I make my escape… I’m free. And all it cost me was my life up until then. But it’s okay. I’m building a new one now—a better one.
This is the part where everything breaks and you fix it, remember?
I remember.
