She has not fallen asleep. She has gone inside.
Her eyes are closed, but they are not resting. One hand is pressed to her temple, the way we hold our head when a thought is trying to escape, or when we are trying to escape a thought. Around her the garden has gone pale. The great leaves are white as plaster, the peonies the colour of old cream, and the paint on her skin has begun to crack, as if she were slowly turning into a statue of herself while she searched for something she lost long ago.
If we ever dared to build a house in the true shape of the soul, it would not have halls and rooms. It would be a labyrinth. Corridors of memory that turn back on themselves, doors that open onto the same garden from another year, stairs that lead down when you meant to go up.
And at the centre of every labyrinth, the old myth says, something is waiting. Half man, half beast. It is the part of us that hungers and fears and does not care for reasons, and in the dark of the maze it is always the stronger. But the myth does not end with the beast. It ends with someone who went in carrying a thread, and found the way back out.
That is where she is now: somewhere between the beast and the thread. The smoke is drifting over half her face. She has not yet decided which way to turn.
This frame was found a year after the shoot, among the others of that day, and given a new name. A sister frame from the same session, Light Soul, lives in the collection of Cozomo de' Medici.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
