at the end of the retrograde, a note from the author

Every time I begin a creative project, it seems to to memorialize a very specific period of time in my life, as though it is the Muses who decide my many epochs and eras. Of any work I’ve written in my life, at the end of the retrograde was by far the most complicated from start to finish. I started this book three years ago, not even certain what it was I was writing about.

It was during my deepest explorations in the surreal world, that I even came to fear this manuscript. Couldn’t even look at it sitting on my desk. Had to put it away, for fear that its expressions were too vulnerable, too true. I’m not sure anything can be too true for art. I’m not sure if keeping it it makes it any less real in the end.

If you have come this far, thank you so much for spending time with me. I hope that the doors you cross, the caves you venture, and the odysseys of your life are filled with thread and fire. If you are, or have ever visited, the surreal world, I hope to equip these forces to your quest. And as you conquer your own inner landscapes, know that you are not alone.

I like to think that the Universe expresses itself using creativity; experience, our invitation to it. I have also learned that the Universe is the master of timing. Have witnessed the near supernatural organization of time when we surrender to gravity, that force ensuring that, in the end, everything will fall right into place. I like to think that something far greater than me pressed pause on this work until the moment was exactly right. This feels like that moment.

every retrograde has its end.

when I see your body.

When I see your body I do not see its curves. I am not looking for its chiseled edges. Through the looking glass of the blue-light on my phone screen you do not appear like the essence of perfection you try to be, not to me. I can see through a body, I can see through “flawlessness.” It’s a skill that has been sharpened by insecurities that once dined with me and then left the table when there were no food left to eat.

I want you to know that you are more than how you appear. Appearance is everything- to the naked eye. But once mine was clothed, it closed and then turned away. There are more windows to the soul than just the eye. And your body is made of glass, where onlookers can either see their own reflection or look deeper and see the spirit stuck inside. What I mean to say is that your spirit cannot hide from me. And as you strip down its layers, all of you is naked. Clothe yourself, sad one. The more you unpeel, the more you reveal. When I see your body, I do not see its curves, I see all of you. Naked through a phone screen. The soul, hiding in plain sight.

-JR

the hardest part, loving you.

The hardest part of losing you was not the letting go but the guilt that drives the desperate need to stay. It was knowing that I was not enough to deliver you from darkness. It was realizing that my love was not stronger than your fingers as they clung to darkness and called it kin. I watched life spin around us. Months wither, roses once in bloom that die gracefully then press into the dry pages of my journal— unpruned leaves I cannot grow.

I am alone at the crossroads of your life now, watching you run through circular routes that only lead you back to me.

If this love, this great love, is not enough to deliver you from you, what am I to do?

When the shape of you is jagged, it is I who feel those edges. Yours is the shoulder on my chest that bleeds out onto your scalp as it lays against me with one hand on an open door. Where is the smoothened skin that our love has softened? The kind that was once pliable? The tender form that wraps itself around my waist as we fall asleep? Leaving me will not make you love more, and leaving you will not make me hurt less.

If my love cannot offer you salvation you know you need but still refuse, than I am but the rain. Beating down on a mountain that resents the storm.

-JR

the shower floor.

Sometimes I have this dream of myself where I am lying on the shower floor. The water hits my face. It is hot and calms me, smoothes me down as if it is the same water that has known the sea glass on the ocean floor, and polished it until it has softened.

Outside the world is screaming. I can hear the hysteria as it slips beneath the slit of the wooden bathroom door. A woman I do not know is shouting over a panicked newscast that proclaims that this is the end of all the world. The bombs start outside as the boom of radar competes with car alarms for my attention. I pay it no mind.

No one bothers you in a bathroom. Even if the world is ending. And now you’ll know where to find me if it does. Alone and calm, accepting that my atoms will turn to dust and be made into something else; perhaps even into some new form that they prefer over my own. I lie, in this dream, on the bathroom floor and hear the blast that calls the final warning.

I know this is a dream, and I know it is the end, yet I’d rather be here. Warm and wet, serene and softened. The bomb drops and all the world goes blue. This is the only time I have known peace.

-JR

on beauty in the digital age.

There was a time I ached for beauty. Recognized it as some power only beholden to those either gifted with supernatural grace or those who would chisel away their imperfections as to ascertain it. I never considered myself among the beautiful, never felt like I was born with a seat at that table. Like most, I selected to boil myself down until all that was left was the basic shape of me. And on that blank canvas, I bled.

Certainly, it was not enough to blame the internet. Fantasy and con-artistry did not begin when we pushed wires together and called them God. Show-women have been powdering their faces with aluminum for centuries. I felt no different, was no different. At some point in my mid-twenties the lights on that stage, at last, all turned down on me. Somewhere in that swallow I decided that I could not settle on the basic shape of me, and decided to paint something new.

Tonight, I have collected portraits from various socials across the internet to decorate my Gallery, and I landed on this conclusion:

Physical beauty on its own is superficial. It is only when we recognize that it is an extension and manifestation of spiritual beauty that it suddenly carries great power. The purpose of creation is that we express inner beauty outwardly; that we integrate these inner and outer parallel dimensions into one seamless whole, so that true inner beauty doesn’t remain locked inside, but is expressed outwardly in the domain of the material. The outer should not be severed from the inner, but rather reflect it.

Tonight I have decided on beauty, Not with the intention to draw some foreign eye, but instead to capture a spirit, an essence; my essence. And elected, going forward, to post only that which expresses some inner beauty outwardly. It seems the subjective experience of inner beauty may change over the course of one’s life, but perhaps can become objective when the essence of the moment it expresses is captured. Photography seems to be one of those mediums.

-JR