050: apertures in the dark

Before you scroll down to this month’s dispatch, I’d love to direct your attention to The Sameer Project. They are currently doing life-saving work in Gaza. If you are in a position to direct funds their way, I urge you to do so.

CW: makes mention of suicide / suicidal ideation

In the summer of 2013, two friends and I flew to Vegas and drove across the south back to New York. All week, I drank until my face went numb. I carried with me a wooden 4x5 pinhole camera and failed to make most photos with the exception of this one photo of the Grand Canyon. Even with its light leaks and barely perceptible details, I still remember how the rising sun washed its copper ridges, the deep purple sky we chased as we drove away. I return to this photograph often, hearing in its nebulousness the echo of a former self I still find morsels of now and again.

When I tell that story, I focus on how we slept on T’s apartment floor, and tried our luck with $5 at the slot machines in Vegas. The breakfast burrito from a gas station in Santa Fe. That odd steakhouse in Amarillo, TX past the Cadillac Ranch. The dry Arizonan heat that laced its fingers on our skin like a quiet threat. How the desert trailed us across the southwest, a sacred stillness haloing its petrified rocks and sand. There was the David Lynch-esque encounter with a blind woman in Arkansas. The night spent camping by the Grand Canyon, drunk and high off our minds, sitting on the hood of T’s white sedan staring up at a sky full of stars streaked red. And the canyon, a mouth agape eager to swallow the sky whole.

For much of the road I kept my eyes on the dilapidated motels scattered like ruins along Route 66. Somewhere in Texas, we got out of the car and started walking around rooms that were deserted overnight a couple of decades ago. Doors and windows left open for wild animals to pass through. The furniture had been tipped over, some fragments of curtains still fluttered in the light breeze. We stood in the relics of a defunct Americana that fell into disrepair during the Reagan era when the route was decommissioned in favor of the current Interstate system. The desolation shaped a vernacular of disillusion. Over the next decades, it would choke the idea of an invincible American life.

What I always leave out of the cross-country adventure story is what prompted me to run away from the city, and spend a week day-drunk sleeping in tents, motels, or a spare room on an old Mississippi farm.

Two weeks before we left for Vegas, my classmate D who had been missing for a week had turned up in a morgue. He had made the decision to part ways with this world, leaving a note in his apartment that read: “I’m tired.” For a week, I sat on his studio floor and stared at his printout of a teary Paris Hilton with D’s “I’m too sad to tell you,” added like a subtitle at the bottom of the photo, a riff on Bas Jan Ader’s work by the same title.

D was and still is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. Aloof, deadpan, hilarious, and incredibly sweet. He’d show up in designer heels and handbags, claim he got all his knowledge about the world from watching The Simple Life then quote Roland Barthes not two minutes later. A few days before he went missing, we had made plans to get lunch together later that week. That would be the last time we ever spoke. For a week, I kept my eyes on the photo, on Paris Hilton’s contorted sobbing face, the running mascara, and that line in yellow type flashing like an alarm hidden in plain sight that none of us heard. I was angry at myself, at him, at despair that can shred a heart so irreparably that nothing short of death can offer longed-for solace.