Enchantment

"Somehow" an ink pen got into the dryer with the whites.  Everything is spotted blue.  Will the next batch of laundry that goes through the dryer be blue, too?  I check with cheap towels.  I'll know in a bit.  What a mess.

I am the mess, really.  Stomach pains last night.  Sushi or too many nights succoring my dying soul?  My head won't clear.  The muzziness is throughout.  My body is wounded.  But nothing goes away.  There is everything still to do.

Already I yearn for the day to be over, for night to come and find me lying on my couch.  In case you wonder, this is a bad sign.  I want to suffer alone.  But I have a shoot tonight with an eager model and one early the next morning, too.  I tell myself no, it is over, but I have obligations and don't know what else to do.

I've shown today's image to a few people and their individual reactions to it were similar to mine.  "Oh--that's lovely."  You can substitute other words, but that is it in general.  I look at it and wonder why.  It is both relaxed and stilted.  An unwilling willingness.  Or vice versa.

But it is no good for me to talk of my own work.  It rubs wrongly.  It just doesn't seem like something that belongs to me, though.  I want to marvel.  I love these women and the work we've done.  Look what they have made of me.

And yet their lives are so complex.  The stories they tell are worth many novels.  Do we do this or is it done?  The moments when we work together, when the music plays and the conversation flows along with the wine, things seem perfect.  That is the wonder of it.  The moments are elegant and we laugh and clap our hands at the Polaroids that fall from the camera and there is a friendly warmth in the air that you want never to end.

But it does.  And they pack up and we go back to our imperfect lives.  I begin to list the details in toto, then change my mind for it sounds sordid and awful and too, too true.  These are the normal people that you see every day.  They cut your hair and serve you drinks.  They answer your calls when your cable goes on the fritz.  Their children play with yours on jungle gyms in parks on Sundays.  They, like all of us, dream of a better life.

And for a few minutes together, we are able to turn that into this.  And I am. . . enchanted.