Every Photograph, A Story I Never Finished
Every frame a scar, every print a wound left open, whispering back at me from the silver grain.
I’ve burned through enough nights to know the smell of singed marrow. Fire in my veins — whisky, powder, rage — whatever I could pour in and call it fuel. I thought I was unkillable, thought pain was a language only I could speak fluently. But fire doesn’t care what name you give it. It eats. It ate. I was young and feral and stupid enough to believe the fire was mine to command, that I could use it to light my way, burn my demons, keep the cold out. Instead, it hollowed me. It took friends, hours, whole years that vanished into smoke I can’t get back.
Somehow I didn’t burn all the way down. The gun missed. The blade healed. The bottle left me breathing when it should’ve left me cold. I crawled through years I don’t even remember, carried by nothing more than stubborn spite. Ten years gone now since the last pill, the last powder, the last time I let fire inside me thinking it would keep me alive. Ten years, and the ghosts still hiss in the smoke, but the fire that tried to take me — it only left me scarred. And scars, ugly as they are, hold me together better than I ever held myself.
Photography’s always been there — the only thing that didn’t demand blood but still stole it, drop by drop. A grounding wire when I should’ve burned out, the one steady surface I could press against when everything else was fire, glass, and wreckage. The lens gave me something to aim at besides my own chest. Every frame is a confession in silver — an emulsion-stained suicide note I never finished writing.
The wrecks, the storms, the forests gutted by fire — they aren’t metaphors, they’re gravestones. I photograph them because they already look like me. A wreck half-swallowed by tide is a reflection of my own face at 4am, eyes red, lungs drowning. A forest turned to ash is just another echo of my nights choking on smoke and powder. Every image is a mirror that doesn’t forgive — it shows me ruined, scarred, splintered, but still upright, still here, ugly as survival itself.
People say photographs hold memory. Mine hold funerals. Each one is a body that never made it home. A laugh caught in the dust-light of a room that doesn’t exist anymore. Friends swallowed by black water that I keep dragging back in frame after frame, even when I swear I’m done. In the darkroom, the ghosts gather. They rise up out of trays of fixer and whisper back at me — what I was, what I lost, what I keep burying in print after print.
Some laughs still echo in the frames — voices of the ones I never saw again. Rooms I can walk back into with my eyes closed, dust hanging in golden light, promises I swore I’d keep but didn’t. They live in the negatives, in the grain, in the shadows that refuse to wash away. Every print hums with a presence that isn’t mine. Sometimes it feels less like I’m developing photographs and more like I’m exhuming the dead.
Every photograph I make is a gravestone I lay for myself in advance. A little proof that I was here, even if I shouldn’t have been. A headstone carved in shadow and grain that says: still alive, still wrecked, still unfinished. Still here, for now.
Maybe that’s why I’m always so hard on my photos. Why I can pick flaws in every frame, drag them open like wounds and call it critique. They’ll never be perfect in my eyes because neither am I. I print them, stack them, shut them in drawers like bodies in morgues. They mutter in the dark, they haunt, but they don’t get hung on my walls. Perfection was never the point — survival was. And survival doesn’t get a frame.
The fire taught me the things comfort never could. That grief tastes like salt and iron. That promises break easier than glass. That silence can feel heavier than any storm. Every loss I carry, every night I drank instead of showing up — they temper me. I am not noble, not clean. I am steel hammered in flame, twisted and blackened, but still holding shape. I wish I could say I regret less, but the truth is regret is part of me now, threaded through the scar tissue like wire.
So here’s the curse and the gift: I thank the fire. I hate it, but I thank it. It forged me, not into something better, but into something that refuses to quit. I don’t glow. I don’t rise neat from ashes. I don’t emerge holy, washed, saved. I’m just still here — smoke-stained, salt-bitten, stitched up with ghosts.
And somehow, against everything, I’m still here.