Author: ruthasphyxia

Pressure

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Circles, circles, goosebumps, pressure.

There was a kindness to the clinking sound as I pushed the coins into the slot.

The physio keeps her eyes closed. Mine are open, visually replaying the juggling game I entertained on the fast lane: two hands alternating their turn to hold in their appropriate timing either the gear lever, the coffee cup, the wheel, the lighter – or, of course, the cigarette.

For once, it’s nice.
It is nice paying parking tickets, it feels responsible, and it feels good in the same way that all these months in which I’d paid with my sweat and tears – to somehow convey this kindness I’m able of sharing – are now preventing bigger, unpleasant costs.


Costs unrecoverable.

Circles, goosebumps, tension, pressure.

The journey here was short, but had a lasting effect. Just like your eyes do, when they speak violent volumes in a blink.

This kindness taught me to acknowledge the memories that are embedded in my muscle tissue, and why certain movements will forever ache from now onwards. May this same kindness teach me the motions indispensable for surviving what is soon to come.

Last night I made a decision, and it just so happens that just like with this particular blue parking meter,

life does not give you returns.

Pressure

Love doesn’t hurt

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Love doesn’t hurt; it can’t.

It’s raging storms between oceans, it’s silent droplets subtly silhouetting sea shells, it’s the waves’ surrender of rolling in before their return.

A force of might that will at times push each of us forwards, or backwards, and maybe both.

Water so vast has always terrified me: whether or not I allowed my being to swim or let itself float, the constant dread of drowning kept me at shallow depths.

My dread and terror isn’t isolated, not in the slightest. I see it in the eyes of deep divers, in the mouths of smooth surfers, and the hands held around opened umbrellas.

You saw the fluid in me, I poured my purest in you. You froze my fingertips into ice, I thawed your frost to warmer hue.

You were the high tide pulled by the soft moonlight deserting me on this island.

I was a cascade that crashed your gate, the ebb that exposed a new path.

Love doesn’t hurt; it can’t.

Rejection does, abandonment does, betrayal does.

We’ve met those who spoke of profound encounters with the deep-bodied, when in reality, they had merely walked the shore-line.

Washed up waves had met their ankles, surely – yet only one foot in at a time, the other out – how cleverly sly.

Affection and trust, devotion and lust, these are tokens we deal, sensations to accept, to nibble or feast. They are acts and choices to connect with the ocean of love. But you, too, know this very well: they are not love in itself.

I created a tsunami for myself, yet protested when it hit, then gave my shards the colour blue. Went in search for a ship, I climbed the first boat: that boat was you.

Shipwreck, wind cleared. May we swim again.

While pain still leaks through my tears and breath, what I’ll keep is the initial love –
the one that’s equal to courage and had me pick up this pen.

Love doesn’t hurt

Insanity – pt. 2

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[ ; ]

Within half the time it takes for a split cell to become a living, breathing human being, I attained this lightness.

Yeah, that one. The very same The Bully had me notoriously convinced I desperately had to have, and so dearly wished to present.

And light I was, but my breath was not.

Oxygen itself began bearing more weight on me than my backside could seat in a chair.


A dried leaf would’ve stood more chances in the ring than both my balled fists. Knuckles protruding, pale, purple.

This whole time, the sound of countless malevolent commands had been mistaken for thoughts of my own in their irrationale, their loudness,

their repetition, their repetition, their repetition

and they had left more traces than my toes could in sand or soil.

Oh, so spoke The Bully, not happy with what we’ve achieved, now are we? Then, with a frown, we met our expectations and then exceeded them so extensively, did we not?

The wind did not cut at my face, instead the flow of air was sliced when it met my cheek bones, and whistled within my hollow jawline.

In the same amount of time it takes for that split cell to become an individual, sentient person, I will see to The Bully, and ensure its undoing. However wary my mind feels about this lightness at the present moment, of this I am sure:

I seek nor lightness or burden. Nor surface or abyss. Nor paradise or peril.

If now, we voice ourselves, if we, cleverly and consistently, manipulate The Bully until it takes our side, we can enable this:

on each day, we’ll have three reasons to smile,
two to laugh,
and one to cry.

One hand to give, and the other hand held.

The Bully will live on, believing it outdid itself, when actually, and this is what we truly aim for: all its hard effort and determination was in fact utterly exploited to put it in its place. Far and even further.

From there, I can only just hear it. If necessary, we can simply cover our ears.


Anything to have it neutralised.

[ × ]

Muted.

Insanity – pt. 2

Insanity

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Photography: Cheratte, Liège (2016) by Jenn von Montigny

You stood back, halted. Refusing to move until your tread becomes one of lightness. The crowd will have to wait until the teardrops have taken the same shape – as you keep telling yourself.

But regardless of the number of months having passed, lightness is nowhere near imaginable reach, and instead agony smothers you.

Your eyes always darting, scanning, searching each room for enshadowed corners, for dusty cobwebs. Not because you think you’ll find anything significant, but because you’d like to become them: something that ties pieces together, but without being noticed by eyes unwelcome.

Lightness is proving unattainable.

[ – ]

If you had any courage left, you could take part in a miracle. The sort of miracle that allows one to be generous with their time and fully accept the all the moments that pass so quickly.

But you find it dull, banal even, to assign any value to these instances simply for not having hurt you, and so you don’t.

The obsession with achieving your lightened tread continued on to inhibit at first gradually, then completely, your capacity for giving appreciation in the very slightest for any environment you breathed in.

You hadn’t the faintest clue that this amount of pressure would reach the point where it manifested as blood stains on your finger nails, the forming of white foam on your eye lines, or a bully’s voice that constantly counted up numbers, loquacious, livid, loud. Looping.

Look at you, spoke insanity, you haven’t advanced. Not a single inch. Tell me, what do you have to say for yourself?

Nothing, you sigh, with an audible heaviness that’s charged your eyes and voice alike. Exchanges with insanity do, after all, come at a cost. One more breath exhaled here, and its grip could’ve swallowed me whole, is what you’d have liked to add, but stating this out loud may have made it come true, and so –


Absolutely nothing.

Insanity

The Formless

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Backlit

 

And finally you feel you’ve hit a nail with a hammer,

when language vaporises in front of your eyes like a temperature cooling off –

unfelt, undignified because it is no longer of any use –

 

So complexity becomes its only means to simplify,

watching beauty bow down and walk away,

made redundant by my chase of the timeless.

 

It speaks to none but me in its unpossessable form;

it is both everything and nothing at all.

 

As though life had invented the mechanism of time

and built me a clock solely for it to tick,

to tick,

to tick,

and count each and every second up to this very moment of paralysing awe

 

The Formless

The Company

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DSC_0214

The tunnel-like glimpse slowly casting light upon your pillow, your focus catching the outlines of fluff and folds in the fabric. Memories of cold and hot settings, darkened corridors and blinding sunlight hitting pavements. One, two, three seconds; we’ve awakened. Water. In us, around us, spell-casted. I for the first time crave its company, its heavy weight formlessly enrobing the shape of my being, adapting, crashing, dancing. Just like you and I, the music of intensity when these powerful thoughts spiral the temperature of our soul upwards, upwards, droplets glistening – here the shine illuminates the structure of our jaws with white sparkles of swaying freckles, I see them moving up your nose, around the socket of your eye, touching the corner of your mouth. Washed over in one movement with the thick red paint of my questioning. Why? This distance so cleverly placed between us slams me down on this bold and black swivelling chair, the absence of craved water felt in the gulp of my coffee, the dryness of my knuckles and the endlessness of this one minute, right now, right here, still, now, now,
now.

The Company

The Esquiva

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cyfg

All of these little brief moments that travel around with me will be glued into my memory like bloodstains on a white cloth. You are my beautiful piece of controversy, the way I cannot seem to let go of the sight of the striking structure of your jaw, but in particular that of your white dress. It danced loosely across your legs, just about covering your knees but revealing your strong shoulders, whom would meet your dark red hair everytime you’d throw your head back in laughter. The green triangle sowed into the fabric above the chest entertained my imagination, it was giving me ideas of shapes, of colours, of movements, all of this while we were circling around each other, locking eye contact, feet lifting at their balls in turning motions. Your voice added a sharpness to the room’s acoustics nearly in the way juice dripping from a squeezed lemon do to a body of water.

There was an elegance in how you swayed your shoulders, a playful dance of salsa that nevertheless hinted at a wilderness wishing to be unleashed. Accept the controversial role you play in my life, one of no meaning but bursting with temperament; it seemed you offered a sensuality I have rarely seen from my masculine peers in the course of my spent history – cheekily you’ve evaporated, leaving me wishing for more. We exchanged names but we can be certain to hold no memory of it, only that of the sparkle we were giving each others’ eyes, similar in colour, identical in determination. As we finally shook each others’ sweat-strickened hands, we nodded in a mutual agreement, in the accepted knowledge we shall probably never meet again, as if signing a contract to be kept as a refreshing dose of inspiration forever residing in my vivid and visual catalogue of memories.

I give my kindest gratitude

Photography by Jenn von Montigny 
The Esquiva

Wide Angle Shot

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MIRROR +Analog sensual

You there – hey.

Are you okay?

What are you wearing? No,  no – not like that.

What made you choose those trousers?


Are they comfortable, do they feature seams? Ankle cuffs?

A waist band, pockets, soft fabrics?

Where are you going? Is it a place where you can feel safe?

Do you notice the posture in the people around you?

Does their gaze make any feelings arise? 

How does the tone of their words transcribe itself in your mind?

[ – ] 

Allow me to pass on these thoughts to you, wherever it is you might be heading to:

Don’t be so quick to dismiss the seemingly silent, the no-fucks-givers, or the sarcastic comebackers. Nor the non-achievers, over-achievers and the remarkably non-conforming.

Show grace to those who don’t sugar-coat reality, who don’t dress it up in something it isn’t. Who speak from the heart, who word themselves with flow of fact, and who get straight to the fucking point. This way of showing up – i.e. listening – is scarce, underrated, and undeniably essential to our emotional nature.

What my experience in life has shown me so far –  between the dusty shelves of countless mind-changes, the reoccurring false impressions, very simple fact there is no such thing as “love at first sight” – is a stance to view people’s characters in a similar way my DSL-Reflex camera does, with its in-built mirror mechanism, a depth of choice, and a shutter executing with stable slowness or a snapping speed.

Preferably no flash.

[ are you still following? ]

The big and bulky, the bearded and tattooed, pierced and scarred, frowned and angered men and women, the growlers and the howlers will, to me at least, reveal themselves as gentle, warm-hearted and understanding, they’ll have the most touching stories to tell, they’ll have the genuine handshakes and the honest hugs.

Don’t be fooled by neatness in impeccable appearances, surface level inquiries, or flattery served rapidly; I have found they are rarely authentic, there’s no big picture.

You too may have felt they aren’t loyal, they aren’t interesting for you to pursue. Life is neither a cheesecake nor a straight line – and forget logic altogether. 

[ are your hands seeking shelter in your pockets? ]

Life, I mean what the fuck.

It’s both confusing and enlightening at once, it’s awkward and strange and the light settings aren’t always great. The focus adjusts in unexpected moments and then fails in times most needed. It’s rugged, it smells and it annoys us in most inconvenient instants, it grows hairs – all of which aren’t any more negative than straightforward reality.

It’s the awkwardness, the mistakes and the let-me-try-that-agains, the failed punchlines, the ultimate and surrendered “who cares?” that make life worth living, that give it humour.

I won’t believe a smile to be true when I’ve seen it smiling at everything and everyone, irrespective of the given moment.

The what-the-fuckery of life, comes down to this:

Breath is short. Truth is endless.

Smile often, but only when your heart truly does, too.

[ Wishing you a safe arrival, a safe return ]

Wide Angle Shot

Crack the Code

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VANS RU

 

[ – ]
 
 
How do you define connection?
 
How personal can you get?
 
Where do you draw the line? Who says there should be a line?
 
How far can you dive into the depths of not physical,
but emotional experience?
 
How do you reason your emotions?
 
 
Has your mind ever cracked?
 
[ – ]

 

    

 

Has it ever been emptied to a void
and then been filled to the brim again?
 
 
Has it ever been shut down and then turned on again?
 
Has it ever spoken to you in voices you don’t remember ever hearing before?
 
Has it ever seized you in a way that had you frightened to the bone?

 

Has your mind ever cracked?
 
[ yes ]
 
 
Photography by Jenn von Montigny
❤

Crack the Code