Long Since Dried (unfinished, draft)

It's been a few months since I've stepped foot in the renovated darkroom at the rear of my tiny studio apartment. I'm running low on my savings from the spread I did for the April issue of...oh, the name of the magazine isn't important. Both it and I have drifted into a morose sort of obscurity. The day-labor place is getting very tiring. I'm in desperate need of cash, but there's one thing standing in my way. No one likes my work. I hardly do, these days.

Artistic inspiration is a pretty chancy thing, you know. When your future depends upon laying your truest, deepest self down on paper for the world to criticize, how do you know whether or not to trust that spark of inspiration? Perhaps what is true to you might not be true to the rest of the world; is the possibility of a shattered construction of reality something you are willing to risk in order to create?

Art is a bitch.

Indelibly printed on a glossy 8.5x11 sheet of photo paper, the family portrait I took at Thanksgiving when I was barely sixteen hangs, framed, just above my work desk. It is my nightmare. It is the embodiment of everything about my craft that I hate. The photo, absolutely beloved by my family, is horrendously flawed to my trained eye. Just one thing is missing. One family member. I am on the other side of the lens. By technicality, part of the family, but in reality I have rarely existed as a true part of that familial unit.

I'm never in the damn scene.

Pawing endlessly through

page after page of

old photos,

he wonders what he has

made of his life.

At all the key moments,

he is there,

not in the scene,

not participating,

just preserving.

Now,

he sits with his camera,

alone.