MOOD BOARD
A space where I caption, unpack, and develop ideas around different content sourced online.
I know deception so well it never shocks or surprises me. Sometimes the fantasy beats the lie, and where fantasy is blissful, the lie is suffocating, for both of us. How dare you lie under me.
A black woman dies, and the world moves on. A black woman mourns, and the world is entertained. A black woman suffers, and the world has no resources. A black woman heals, and the world thanks her. No thanks welcome, nobody deserves it.
(2Pac)
I wanted a chain so bad when i was younger, I begged my Aunt to buy the fake Ruff Ryder’s family chain at market day. She bought it too. I wore it until my neck turned turquoise, and kept wearing it until it happened to break. From that, I learned, things changing on me doesn’t always mean I have to let it go, but sometimes, it means those things are letting go themselves.
(Agnès Varda, 1968)
Things are wrong all over. The reefer man doesn’t know what “zaza” is. The children are being manipulated by their own audience. Mothers don’t care about texture. Fathers don’t care about jazz. Businesses are the new weeping willow tree. Music is the ho. Film plays a skipped scene. Books collect dust where we once danced free.
Cane River (1982)
Playing in the skin. Laughing in the morning. Tracing past scar origins. Inquisition morphed to wonder. There is no point to place. No boundaries to knock. No narrative to shift. An empty, but somehow self fulfilling experience.
Twice. Jerzy Kałucki. 2001. Acrylic on canvas (140 x 110 cm).
Building and rebuilding the same world until it feels like home. I always test the air, first, but it’s never quite brisk enough. I always look around to find the tallest mountain, but it’s out of sight. I always kick the grass to test the soil, but it’s always, so damn soft. When I realize the sun is setting or rising, it’s time to destroy and rebuild, and maybe the next time, the air will cut me to pieces, the mountain will crush my eyes, and the soil will hold me up.
The drag of either disappointment or lethargy.
Isolated & Touching Forms. Mark Francis. 1997.
Are these points still? Or in motion? Still, there’s a feeling of isolation, even between the points grouped together. Individualism amongst the many, even in groups, or in close proximity to others. Stretching the narrative through the color black housing all hues, it’s possible these points represent us as people, how we’re all the same, but different. Leaving small traces from where we’ve been to arrive at different points, but still, similar, at different points. In motion, it’s as if each point is going in the same direction, at similar paces. It seems representative of regression, since they are going left, thus backward, or, thinking about geography, represents the western direction. In either case, the mustard background is symbolic of joy, but against these smeared points, it’s indicative of being on top of the optimism, joy, and freedom of the hue but not exactly of it.
Moonlight (2016)
A receptive gaze, but with little confidence and guard. Downward, it’s indicative of process, but with self judgement. There’s a sliver of guilt or shame behind what happened before that gaze downward. There’s a brick wall in the eye, innocence in the look, but more sense when the eyes drop.
Moonlight (2016)
Like seeing your spouse for the first time, it’s like time is frozen, at least I assume. Or like seeing someone you’ve known and grown with for a long time for the first time, the sentence or group of thoughts that change the foundation of a relationship. The query of the eye, the suggestive sigh, the small gesture outward, are signs of reprogramming, reformatting, and transformation. That’s what this look is, the look of transformation.
I’ve been thinking about using the digital space as a way to preserve my person. This is my archive. Bits and pieces of my experiences, my values, and my progress are spread out over multiple social platforms, and it’s riling my soul up for some reason. I’m not sure if I overshare as much as I’m sorting through how I feel and what I’m going through, through social media, and it’s corny, but I did it/am doing it subconsciously. To disband from that process I’m going to prioritize my platform, this is my home, where I can do whatever the fuck I want, and I need to start playing here as I played on my blog in middle and high school. I just mood boarded. Sulked through prose. Celebrated through music. Created my own words sometimes. It was my world. This is also, my world. I believe in it. I know and understand the power of color theory as a lifestyle, but I also appreciate spaces with multiple intersections. A true world of its own; curated, and tuned by real-life flipped, reversed, and manifested into a goldmine of an imagination. I want to build that here, through and through, whether it’s just me talking shit, whether I’m relaying pieces of strong conversation, or just throwing caution to the wind and unraveling, completely. I feel safe here. I am safe here.
Saying all of their names into blank, dry, cold, grim air that drifts into even colder, stoic, flaky, deterrent ears. Who hasn’t heard their names that needs to? I wonder if God keeps this same list with them.