WHEN BETTER IS WORSE

PS: weheartit.com

You got curious, so you reached deep down. You ventured into the heart of your own darkness with the hope of lighting a flame and truly seeing, for the first time, who you really are. You thought you could claim the shadows and come back shaken, but stronger than before. You never considered that the shadows may claim you. When I saw you again your eyes were hollow and luminescent like Japanese lanterns. You said you were enlightened, but I could see that you were merely blind to the darkness that still lingers beyond the lights. You were overcome with the light. High on it. Your glowing eyes made you lose sight of the dark islands of pain in the people around you. How could you fail to see that even the sun cannot shine without casting a shadow?

OPEN YOUR EYES

PC: Martina Hoogland Ivanow

Open. Close. Your eyes are clouded with the things you haven't left behind. You blink and in that instant everything changes. What happened? You watch life move around you, and it is a story projected to you by your heart. It is your heart, not your eyes, that decides to see the softness in the fallen snow rather than the dead leaves and rotting flowers underneath. Open. Close. What do you see? Life is neither darkness nor light and in everything that's beautiful there is also foul. And yet, when your heart weighs heavily on your eyes and the stories they whisper back to it are tragedies painted gray, your heart will paint the whole world gray. In the sudden sweep of sadness all the colors are washed away and you become a stranger to the world; a color-blind projector of your broken heart. Do you see? The world is waiting just beyond your sorrow. Open. Close.

THE SILENT MUSIC

He could have been a cedar planted among cedars; indistinguishable from the rest all swaying in unison to the silent music of the wind. He could have been a cedar because at the end of the day he wasn't afraid to be a nobody. He knew he was just like the others and this knowledge rooted him against the storms of fall and ice of winter. His solid cedar heart was never twisted with the longing to fly above the rest as a bird flies. He watched his friends splinter as their branches reached for an unattainable horizon and he knew that they would never be happy. He marveled that the sky could break one's heart simply by being. Up there. Unattainable. He felt his roots reach deep into the black earth softly pressing against him on all sides the way his mother did before he could even remember. He was alive. He was happy. Swaying softly to the silent music, far beneath the sky.

HOPE AND BRAVERY

Bravely bravely they told her. Life won’t destroy you. But after years of standing tall beneath the heavy sky, she began to stoop like a sunflower burdened with its fruition. At any moment she was going to snap in two and fall to the soft earth in pieces where she would be picked apart by hungry animals. And it seemed that everyone was hungry to pick her apart – to devour her out of existence. Sinking in the deep dark grass that hadn’t been cut all summer, she gave up. Her resignation letter was written carelessly on her soul, folding over against the weight of her words and placed warily under a star shaped thought blowing from the empty halls of her heart where hope used to be.

HER SONG

PC: Waldemar and Max

She sang to me, her words reverberating like broken strings on a Spanish guitar. But softly - softer than any old guitar could sing. Every broken note filling the empty places in my broken heart until it was whole again. The song carried through the day and wrapped around the glowing stars at night. In the morning, she sang me into existence. But all songs must end. And in ending, this song flung my ribs open like a bird cage and let the ghosts of her melody fly from the holes time could not heal. I lost myself searching for the forgotten memory of her voice. Time was the last string, and she broke that too.

NO END IN SIGHT

PC: Toby Burrows

It is precisely because life is too short that I'm scared to live it. One wrong move and the precious few moments I have are clipped like a bird's wings, forever tying me to the choices I have made. Too many mistakes and instead of flying I'm flapping vainly, moving empty air around a pathless life that was made to be seen from the clouds. I cannot see where I'm going from way down here. Every night I dream of leaving the ground behind and cutting a small space for myself in the sky. Becoming a spinning satellite with no end in sight.

LOVE AND DARKNESS

PC: Gred Williams

Her love was a crescent moon, forever waning until nothing remained to illuminate the darkness that clung, always waiting, around the edges. She loved him precisely because his eyes looked through her, coldly, indifferently, without even being aware that her crescent heart burst yearning only for him. She loved him precisely because he didn’t love her. Until one dark winter morning, for no particular reason, his eyes turned and suddenly saw her. She stood gripping her crescent heart, quivering in anticipation of the coming rejection that would set her glowing miserably. He smiled. All the lights went out.

TO BE CAESAR

PC: Paul Rowland

He waited for a reason. Any reason. But it was an island he couldn't reach. Life just was...undefinable. He was a drifting shadow on a grain of salt orbiting a burning match in a vastness he couldn't bear to imagine. It was really all a dream and when only when he'd die would he wake up and know the reason. All his life he had wanted to be Caesar because just being himself never seemed enough. It never occurred to him that had he attained his greatest dream - had he become Caesar, he would still be the same quiet lonely kid he had always been, and given this fact, would probably be wildly disappointed with the position.

A STRANGER

PC: Kevin Macintosh

She felt so small she could sail the paper boats she liked to set on the water. She would watch them grow smaller and small, thrown by the waves and thrashed by the wind, and her soul would sail in pursuit of the small white speck on an infinite rolling sea. To sail through storms only to rinse her broken heart the way her mother rinsed the dishes after dinner. To come out on the other side of the world a stranger to everyone, but to her heart especially.

HIDDEN DIALOGUE

- Hey, I know you!
Will she remember me?

- Hey!
How do I look?

- How've you been?
I've missed you.

- Not bad.
Lost. The city is bigger than me. My body is bigger than me. I feel so much smaller than I am.

- Good. You look great!
She looks great.

- Thank you.
He's lying.

- Did I catch you at a bad time?
I hope you stay a while.

- No, I was just walking home.
I hope you'll walk with me.

- Ah, well I don't want to keep you.
She doesn't have time.

- Oh...alright. Some other time then.
He doesn't have time.

KILLING TIME

PC: Steven Meisel

They shimmered like the ocean on a summer's day. A million tear-drop diamonds dropped into the sea breaking the light into a million directions. They had no direction. No plan. They were swept up by their youth, their talent, and a bottomless agenda. Days were crossed off like items on a list. Sometimes he would look at her just to remind himself what her eyes looked like, and every time he did he found them changed. Had it been a year already? They thought they were just killing time. But in fact, time was just killing them.

SILENT SYMPHONY

The first time he saw her he felt his soul try to leave his body. All breath left him and his teeth rattled. He saw his future weaved into her hair, falling across he skin and playing between her eye lashes. And it scared the rhythm out of his heart. He never looked at her again. He didn't dare, as long as he valued his freedom. She always sat at the other end of the cafe under a large window where the dust drifted glistening above her head like a silent symphony. And he knew every note by heart. She dropped into his dreams like a coin into a hollow well followed by a wish. The echo of her presence carried through his days, never waning. Always waxing. One day they had bumped into each other reaching for the sugar by the cash register. It was snowing outside and their touch released a static spark. She looked up at him and laughed a deep hot chocolate laugh. That spark nearly set him on fire. He found himself reflected wildly among the lights dancing in her eyes. He looked away. He would not be captive. When she did not come the following week he was unsettled. When she failed to come in the weeks that passed thereafter quiet anxiety turned to dread. In the sweep of spring he realized that the only thing he feared more than losing his freedom was losing her. He never saw her again, but the echo of her memory never waned. Always waxed - long after his hair turned gray. He never even knew her name.

THE BIG HURT

Through it all I sat prostrated unable to move a finger. The big hurt pressed existence down to a single dimension and I was made of stone simply because my heart was not. No, but it was heavy. Heavier than anything else on earth, and all because he didn't love me. He who was lighter, and about as important, as the sand that catches in your hair on a windswept day. The more time dragged me along the more the big hurt hardened my skin against the world. I became a statue and my heart grew cold in its tomb. Years passed before true love would find me waiting, unmoved. And it fell like a hammer from the sky, freeing me from the past in a million flying pieces.

HER STAR HUNG HIGH

PC: Norbert Schoerner

Her star never hung high, but when it fell it burned up brighter than any of the others. In her quiet dress behind the cash register her talents taunted her, and she was ashamed. As a student she outshone her peers, and there was never any doubt that she, in all her sparkling champagne brilliance, would one day be somebody. Years passed, and when "one day" had come, she found herself lost completely. Tucked away in the produce aisle, the future shimmered before her like a desperate hallucination in the driest corner of the earth. An island of cold anticipation in the light. A spotlight on the body.

HEARTACHE OF A STRANGER

PC: Randall Slavin

She wanted to scream until her lungs collapsed. Scream and scream and scream until someone heard her. "My heart hurts," she wanted to say, "I'm here, but I'm not. I have a name, but I feel nameless. I feel like I was born yesterday and inherited all the heartache of a stranger."

YOU ARE A FISH

PC: www.weheartit.com

Swim swim. The waves break and the sky rolls black over your head. The water shivers far below the surface you tread. And you keep on swimming thinking that surely you're getting somewhere. You breast stroke your life away unable to see that you're a fish and belong under water.

RAGE AND THEN REGRET

PC: Camila Akrans

He hated the moment he knew the day was over. The sky had barely turned pink and the birds fell silent. Another day was gone. Every evening he clenched his fist against the setting sun so as not to count his regrets. He would pace his room, and beat his fist through the wall and against his chest, trying to still the ticking nestled, like an unbreakable egg, between his lungs. He wished for the day the sun would not set. The day he would never have to die. The day regret lost all meaning.

ONE MINUTE

PSource: weheartit.com

It's nothing more than a dream. Just a dream. The entirety of your life. One minute you're barefoot chasing dreams like fireflies and the next you forget the feeling of the grass and why you're even running in the first place. Years go by and as the colours fade you know, but unable to admit, that your fireflies have left you. There is nothing else to guide you through the darkened night and you remain forever solemn, staring out the window waiting for the flickering lights.

DESIGNER INSIDES

Nothing will ever look as good on you as happiness.

THE STALE AIR

PC: Mel Karch

He told her stories. His words twisted around her unresponsive body and she began to listen. The stale air filled with magic and her mind turned from the pain to the flow of words coming from his mouth. Her imagination flamed wildly - a forest fire chasing the shadows from where they hid in her heart.

YES AND YES Txema Yeste

PC: Txema Yeste

Yes and yes. A thousand times yes. Even small requests carry, wrapped quietly within them, monumental galaxy-forming possibilities. You can't afford a single no, and even a single no can change the course of your existence, carrying you further from your dreams.

LIFE'S DISTRACTIONS

PC: Rengim Mutevellioglu

She spun and she spun, shifting from one room to the next, from one city to another - she was little more than a faint dash of light in her family photos and to her friends she was always light years away. she could not sit still. And if by some quiet magic she fell rooted to a single place, her hands shook and she chewed on her finger-nails until they hurt. There was no stillness for her. When life failed to distract her, she failed to want to live it.

PALE LIGHT

PC: Francesca Tallone

She stood waiting for the street-light to turn green. She was a crescent moon caught waxing on the other side of a river made of moving steel. She tugged on the front of her shirt with her free hand; smoking a cigarette irritably with the other. She was beautiful in her round luminescence but, just as a flash-light cannot turn to illuminate itself, she remained ignorant of her light. She tugged on her shirt again to flatten her roundness. She would have flattened her own soul if someone told her it made her look fat.

MANUFACTURED SELVES

PC: Magdalena Kmiecik

The shelf is tall and the aisle is long, and I, small and insignificant, sit lost to myself among the objects there. I am a product. I am a manufactured decision put on the shelf for you to choose - or not choose - as you wish. Will you choose me? Am I worth the price? Will you be my friend? Lover? Employer? Teacher? Or will I be redesigned and repackaged to suit your needs? Reach into the bag and pull out a suitable handful of characteristics. A new sense of humour, a new political stance, new likes and dislikes. A new me among a million new yous put on the shelf along the endless aisle, where nothing but the system remains permanent. Personality is a process - the bastard chunks left on your plate which you are bound to wash away or discard.

FOR SHIN

Her heart fed his vanity, so he kept it in his pocket and painted the masks he wore with the dreams he found in her unconditional affection. He put her down softly. So softly that his dark words sounded like love songs. He held no mirrors in his soul and looked at himself reflected in her eyes, because in them he found his flaws erased. She loved him and he loved that she loved him, so he broke her heart slowly. He furnished the spaces inside her with quiet confusion and self doubt until his invisible flaws became her own. He remained perfect in her eyes.

ARTISTIC GENIUS

The most beautiful words can pass through the grayest tightly clenched teeth. Even I, the grayest thing of all, can create something remarkably unlike myself.

CUT YOUR HAIR AND GET A JOB

You are loved and your happiness is important to those who love you. When they told you not to cut your hair they really believed it wouldn't suit you. You really wanted to try, but were too scared that they were right. So your hair stayed long. They expressed many reservations when you suggested that you wanted to go to art school. They said that art didn't pay and that they want you to have a comfortable life. You didn't want to be comfortable - you wanted to take a risk, but were scared not to heed their warning. So you went to law school instead. But art followed you. It came to you every night and every morning. It swooped from the tree-tops and, when you looked up from your case briefs, you saw it written in the clouds and heard it carried in the wind. They told you to get your head out of the clouds and into your books. They were scared you wouldn't graduate. But you did graduate and you found a quiet office job where you wrapped yourself in moderately priced cotton suits under flickering florescent lights. After work, alone in your apartment, you created your silent works of art the only way you could - as a half-neglected part-time hobby. In your heart you remained asleep by your desk under the florescent lights and only came alive at night, covered in inspiration. One day, without saying a word, you left work early. Standing barefoot in the bathroom you cut off all your hair and found that it suited you perfectly. You enrolled in art school that very night.

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER WITH A SECRET

PC: Giuliano Bekor

She was a fashion photographer with a secret. To her designer fashion was a smeared question mark on soiled paper lying somewhere at the bottom of a well. Yet she read Vogue with a racing heart. The words didn't matter, the dresses didn't matter - not even the pretty models with their small doll-like faces mattered. What mattered was the strange and mysterious combination of all these. She didn't want to sell anything - she wanted to create art. She didn't want to lie to anyone - play it off like anyone could purchase the fantasy in her pictures. As if the fantasy could ever be embodied in a pair of shoes, or a high-waisted dress, or a studded jacket. She didn't want to sell out.

SECRET TRUTHS

It was 1935 when young Esmeralda turned sixteen. She got a new dress and she wore it to school where everyone would notice. Esmeralda was petty. Her teachers and parents believed that she would always remain insignificant to the world - like the period in a sentence that one skims absentmindedly and quickly forgets. Even her friends thought her ugly because her heart was made of coals. It wasn't until many years had passed, as Esmeralda lay withering quietly in a concentration camp, that the truth came out. Night had fallen and in it's silence Esmeralda heard a rustling at the foot of her bunk. Her old teacher, toothless and bend with exhaustion, stood stealing the shoes off her former student's feet. Their eyes met and, frozen in shameful recognition, the teacher let her gaze drop. Silently, the girl kicked off her shoes and went back to sleep. In the morning she walked barefoot to work in the snow.

IF YOU WERE A MAP

PC: Marc Mez

If you were a map could you locate yourself on it? Could you take a detour?

KEEP YOUR ELBOWS IN & YOUR EYES DOWN

PC: weheartit.com

She felt so lonely her gums ached for company. She took to coffee shops in order to be around people. Alone, her heart was an empty coloring-book, but the presence of people filled it with rainbow-scribble laughter. At the coffee shop they sat separated by as much space as they could manage, unless all the seats were taken and there was no other option but close proximity. Sitting there she always hoped for a divine spark to descend from heaven and ignite a passionate conversation between these strangers sitting elbow to elbow with eyes deliberately averted. The spark never came, but occasionally someone would smile at her silently. He heart would quicken in anticipation until the sense of opportunity dissipated and she felt as alone as ever. Was she the only one who felt this way? Where their walls eredcted to keep people like her away? Or were they waiting, as she was, just beyond their averted eyes?

HORRIFYING REALITY

PC: Therese Fische

She spent all her life in a box. She thought it was cozy. Then one day she woke up to find the box blown away, tattered and disappearing over the horizon. The sky curved blue and violet over her head and she realized, for the first time, just how large it was. She wondered what she was going to do with all the free space the sky, suddenly so very exposed without the usual limits placed on it, afforded her. She felt lost in its wide expanse. Only then did she see that, all her life, she wasn't really cozy but caged. Freedom can be a horrifying reality to those who have remained slaves to the darkness.

OPEN YOUR EYES TO THE DAY

PC: Terry Smith

His shoes were too big and flopped like slippers on his sockless feet. If he ever wore a shirt, he liked to wear his favorite (and only) t-shirt with a life-sized portrait of a Labrador Retriever printed in full color on both sides of the wrinkled fabric. He smoked cheap cigarettes through chapped lips, spoke with a tired raspy voice and remained happy every moment of his life. Everything he owned he had acquired from strangers' caring hands, or else from the empty night time streets. Every morning he smiled before he opened his eyes to the day.

OWN WORST ENEMY

PC: Hedi Slimane

He couldn't remember when he first became angry. What started as an almost imperceptible stain quickly decayed and spread through him like rust, leaving a open chasm where his compassion used to be. He hated people, especially those who were entirely different from him. Sometimes he became so angry that he'd find the most horrifying thoughts shoot through his head like dragons in a cloud of smoke. And the rust continued to spread, eventually taking over his reason as well. He was caught in a closed circle. The more he hated others, the more he expected to be hated. The more he wanted to hurt those around him, the more he feared others wanted to hurt him. These irrational fears evoked the wind of an even deeper hatred which only further fed the fear in his heart. He needed to be saved from himself.

ESCAPE THE CLUTTER

PC: weheartit.com

She packed her bags while the sun lay winking coyly at the horizon. Her parents slept wrapped up warmly like burritos in their blankets - completely oblivious to her plans as they always were. Their home was large and expensive; her closet was a micro-cosmos of the house, and she was a receptacle of everyone's expectations. They were "lucky" as her mother always called it, and this meant that there were certain rules she had to follow - certain schools she must attend, certain people she had to meet. She didn't feel lucky. She felt cluttered and unnatural. Now, as the sun sighed its first morning breath over the horizon, she headed north. Towards the mountains.

ONE SMALL UNIVERSE

PC: Michelangelo di Battista with model Rosie Whiteley

An idea - a story begins to form in the tired mind of an old author as he sits alone by the fire. He sips his cognac and the characters materialize as of their own volition in his drowsy mind. They take on definite angles which fill with light and shadow. Their hollow bodies fill with thoughts and desires. Their hollow universe fills with history. They dance and sing and make love; they wage wars against one another and make peace in the brief interval our author hangs between waking and sleeping. Perhaps one day they will materialize on ink smeared paper and claim some small part of this existence. Or else, they will disappear forever the moment the cognac takes effect and our author's head falls soundly sleeping on his chest. Unbeknown to them, their fate hangs uncertain in the balance.

Does Life Start the Moment You Grow Up?

PC: Paolo Roversi "Class of 2006" in Vogue Feb 08

Seems like the moment we grow up we need to start running away from our childhood memories. They are not the frame that contains your portrait. Your memories have nothing to do with you. Before there is choice, before there is even the possibility of choice to act or not act, we cannot say that our lives are our own. We are then like figures in someone else's dream.

REACH FOR THE...

PS: weheartit.com

TRUTH

PS: weheartit.com

The moment pure light passes through the prisms of our eyes it bends and scatters into the colors we have spent a life-time expecting to see. Colors that accurately paint a picture of you in the most vivid detail but that hold no resemblance to the original beam of truth you hoped to see. So much of what we believe in is merely the frosty breath of an unknown figure hiding in the shadows of our imaginations.

MOTHER'S DAY

To the Mother I never had,

I watched you slump over the kitchen table with a long slim matinee smoking between your well-manicured fingers. Your hands always fluttering between mouth and cigarette. If you had payed attention to everyone as you did to your cigarettes you would have seen rainbows appear out of your storm clouds. Rainbows I would have given anything to bask in. Instead I basked in your self-hatred. There were times I felt that loving you, hating yourself, would stop my heart from beating. Still, I would have given my life to weave the frayed fabric of your heart back together. But my life did no posses the necessary magic that could have saved you. You were always softly outlined in pencil. You had no essence and the lightest touch rubbed you out of existence. I felt incapable of hugging you. I wished it had been different. I wished I could have seen you completely lit up: the sun shining on you face, and your darkest shadows always falling behind you unnoticed. I wish you could have found your peace, and in that peace, the people who always loved you.