portrait of a soulmate
+ freshly developed film sneak peeks
“Portrait of a soulmate” is maybe my favorite body of work (also, from a critical and technical standpoint, probably my weakest) (I really think it’s a shame that writing has become such a big part of my practice, because I do not enjoy writing. getting myself to write is like pulling teeth. but here we are). It took me around two years to write each of the two pieces that exist in the series thus far (L I K E. P U L L I N G. T E E T H.). I’ve been working on the third piece for two years now, and it still barely exists. The pieces are gifts to my soulmates, and studies on how important expansiveness in partnerships is to me.
I was looking back on my notes about relationship hierarchies and the whole soulmate thing from 2021 - the first time I really tried to articulate how I felt about any of that. I was surprised to look back and see how clearly I understood myself then. A lot of things have happened in my life in the last couple years that have brought what felt like a completely novel level of clarity to the way I view relationships/relationship hierarchies, so it was surprising to look back at those notes and see that I haven’t actually been realizing anything new, I’m just putting new language on it (last summer I went on a couple dates with someone from tinder and ultimately, he was ew but the one good thing they did give me was an introduction to the term “relationship anarchy”, which I now love and possibly overuse).
the first
It was as if our lives had moved parallel since we were born. She doesn’t remember the first time those paths converged, but it was a morning that lived in me for the ten years before we met again. It happened on a school bus, leaving from the school we’d both started at, moving on to something bigger and better for brighter children. Something we’d both attained through the kind of trauma that makes you the kind of kid people always describe as “precocious”.
I was eight years old, and had just started wearing glasses – those unflattering frames we all wore in the early 2000s because it was the early 2000s and no one knew any better. That alone would have been enough to give me a complex, but combining the glasses with being the new kid at school really solidified it. I was at a point in my life where I hardly talked to the people I knew, let alone complete strangers, so getting onto the bus and seeing that neither of the two friends I usually sat with were there– and honestly, it was shocking that I’d managed to acquire two of them – was an absolute nightmare. But then, there she was. She saw my distress and offered me a smile and then the seat next to her. We rode to school that day without another word spoken between us. That morning set the tone for our entire relationship. An unspoken knowledge of each other’s feelings and needs, an unspoken agreement to meet one another where we are, and grow together from there. That was the morning I met the person in whom the same soul as mine resides – and I think, in some sort of cosmic, written-in-the-stars kind of way that I’d usually say I don’t believe in, I knew it from that moment.
We met for the first time in her memory ten years later, members of the same honors college as undergraduates – precocious children grown into full-tuition scholarship recipients. I knew her the moment I saw her. Later, I told her so, and recited the memory. That, and my declaration that I wanted to be a nude model for an art class at some point, would make up her earliest memories of me.
We may have seemed like an unlikely match, but our parallel lives clicked into place alongside each other at that point. We would work the same job while dating the boys we thought we would marry. I would make welcome home signs when she moved back after her breakup and she would have a pint of ice cream waiting for me when I moved back after mine. I would call her with a fake emergency to rescue her from a family outing gone on too long and she would care for me in the drug-induced haze after I got my wisdom teeth removed. We lived in the same dorm hall and then the same dorm room and eventually the same bed because we couldn’t afford two of them, in a too-old house on the wrong side of town, in the room that was our refuge from the world during the months before she started her life with the husband whose earliest memory of me would be my arrival home one day brandishing a dildo, and before I headed abroad to start a new life thousands of miles and an ocean away. I placed her in the care of her husband – now it was for him to eat the food she could never finish, to wade through the crushed-but-never-quite-empty plastic water bottles – and she placed me in the care of a new country, with the reassurance that I would always be able to come back and resume eating the food she could never finish and wading through the crushed-but-never-quite-empty plastic water bottles (metaphorically now, as she’s recently kicked the plastic water bottle habit I spent years fighting her on). And sometimes we won’t talk for months and sometimes we talk every day but still our growth moves parallel and still I always know in her I have a home
the second
I. Four beds
She doesn’t like sleeping alone, I learn
within days of meeting each other as roommates in Italy
when she pushes our two twin beds together
so we can sleep side by side.
One year later,
we share a bed
“one last time”
the night before her wedding.
Two years later,
nothing much has changed.
We sleep with the baby between us
as her husband sleeps on the couch.
Five years later,
we sleep with the next baby between us
while her husband is gone for the night
after I move to her hometown to care for her children.
from my annual dead-brother’s-birthday roll
II. Three saucepans
She feeds me, and I do the dishes.
We’ve nearly run out of money, but she can make magic out of nothing.
She won’t tell me what’s in the pasta sauce until I’ve tried it -
mayonnaise, ketchup, olive oil, and oregano.
We eat it straight out of the saucepan.
We sit on the floor of her apartment after a day of wedding prep.
I tell her I’m not that hungry,
but she doesn’t believe me
and makes us each an entire box of mac and cheese.
We eat it straight out of the saucepan.
To break a streak
of feeding her children nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
I make a box of mac and cheese for lunch.
I serve their portions
and eat the rest straight out of the saucepan.
III. Two late nights
In the early days, I was reckless and she was worried -
that was the general state of things.
a candle left burning, waiting for me to return home
a panic when in the morning,
the candle still waiting, nearly burned to the quick,
one half of the bed still empty
Six years later -
one light left on in the living room,
she, out late on a date with her husband,
I, in the bedroom singing lullabies to her babies.
She still worries,
but I give her less reason to.
IV. One
I knew I loved her
I knew she loved me
I knew it would last
artistic research for a holistic practice
ritual + meditation
whimsy whimsy whimsy
gifts: given + received
time + space for beautiful things (check out ephemeral arts hereeee)
bits and bobs
should I start noting what film stock I shoot on? other photographers do that. is that interesting information?
I have developed an Irn Bru craving that won’t go away, which is a shame because I think the closest Irn Bru to me is in Colorado. this is a weird craving because I don’t think I’ve had an Irn Bru since 2019.
I wore this outfit and someone told me it was giving “bully from the karate kid”. which, tbh, I’m into as an aesthetic.
I need to renew my passport soon, which feels insane. this passport arrived on the christmas eve before I spent a summer in Italy when I was in college.
I currently have 19 emails in my inbox (0 unread), and that is completely overwhelming to me. I usually sit at a cool 5, maximum. I don’t know how so many of you live with tens of thousands.
xoxo,
the mindful narcissist
Actually crying. You're here saying that you don't enjoy writing and yet you have the most fucking gorgeous juicy delicious way of story telling with your words. Please don't ever stop. I want a full book. I want to devour it all. 😭