The hair, shoes and hand from the full body image, the monster mouth from the yam, the angle of the demon wings borrowed from my camera arm, as well as the hand, with the horn and ear inspired from the camera strap.
January?
A recent drawing of mine and a 2005 photograph of my mother with her dogs.
The dogs inspire the fur collar. There’s subtle stripes like steps to the left of his drawing.
January 24th
His flickr photo of syrup while we dine at IHOP. Sticky Friends. [flickr]
He hides me in plain sight.
February 13th
I find out I have to move out by the end of March. I am upset, and Stefan consoles me.
Later, Stefan and I have an email exchange, that ends in this:
email from me to Stefan
… I can’t write things that are good enough right now … or would write anything better than the warm feelings your words have put in my head… the feelings would look like… of us both growing and transforming into giant real-bear sized stuffed animals in bright pastel colors, and engulfing each other in giant fluffy hugs…. falling over and rolling down a grassy hill covered in autumn leaves, giggling and hooting all the way. (there’s more… and it’s happy and silly and glorious and lovely-awesome)
with warm happy insides.
hooray for the warm happy insides.
thank you for everything, everything, everything.
(i’m glad we have flaws)
which inspired the following drawing of mine:
February 15th
I tell Stefan he is welcome to refer to me as his girlfriend.
I’d not share myself with you physically if you were bedding someone else, pursuing someone else… but I only want your company, in whatever way you share it, because you so desire it. Anything else is shallow and bitter. I’d rather know that every time you visit, every time you say or do something kind, it’s because you felt it, not because it was according to some previous arrangement.
March ??
New Years Eve 2007.
The bottle makes the tree shape, the curtains and blinds behind explain the horizontal lines and dripping from the branches, my ear and eye, his face, our hair combined.
March ??
We’d seen Rasputina play together. This is a photo I took at that show.
March ??
I drew a Stefan skull.
Date?
He had asked me to model for this painting.
April 12th
A self portrait from August 2007.
This day, April 12th, Stefan emailed me this photo of a new painting he was working on, titled “Tick Child”.
An image posted later on shows the finished character.
Because of my Lyme Disease?
He makes his facebook profile picture a selfie he’d taken of himself in my Fox Fest shirt in Ocean Grove. [fb]
Me hidden in plain sight.
April 20th
My bloody or topless photographs / drawings from 2007-2008.
Originally emailed to me. The yellow eyes match the mattress.
April 23rd
April 29th
My photo from June 2008.
April 30th
More and more, Stefan is finding reasons to question my motivations, to be offended with me. To discard me. He calls me an exhibitionist. I reply.
May 1st
Four days apart. I post a [flickr] photograph of the statues at Newark Penn Station, for which both my mother and I were cast as models. He posts a Sticky Friends photo he’d cropped and desaturated.
May?
Getting my drivers license back after it had expired.
May 13th
July 2005
The dog and deer combine to make a bear, the idea of a hat remains, but is inspired by the shiny pots and cleaning product. The pink ribbon becomes tongue, antlers become teeth, the same crystal blue eyes.
May 27th
email from me
You make me happy. You make me laugh and giggle and feel like an 8 year old more than anything has since I was such an age. You, dear friend, are what makes me thankful for having survived thus far. I feel lucky beyond comprehension that I have been fortunate enough to be blessed with your companionship. You give me something to cling to in this terrible world – but I’d hold it to me just as tightly if the world were a less awful place.
i’m not as skilled with my words as I’d like right now. Not as loquacious or prolific as I’ve been in some of my emails in the past….
But you, my dearest bestest friend, are a fabulous human. The best I’ve ever known. Better than I ever even dreamed up in my most glorious imaginings.
I wish you a wonderful birthday.
June ???
Phone pics to Stefan.
The baby with a torn earlobe, like mine.
June 9th
Emailed to me. My Ocean Grove sunglasses phone pic to Stefan combined with this X-ray nearby in my flickr feed.
His drawing is tinted to match the siding behind me.
June 11th
All photos near each other from 2005.
The owl is not what it seems. It has cat eyes.
The light beaming against the cat’s face creates the owl profile.
June 12th
The hand position and outside smoking of the previous image brings him to this photo I took of him in 2008.
… which in turn brings him to this old photograph of his own, which he posts.
Brothers brings him to this 2005 photograph of me and my brother.
(originally emailed to me as a shitty photo, but updated with a later scanned version.)
My brother’s hands reused as the monster’s hands.
My recent drawing, then his. Brothers.
Scanning in old family stuff at my Aunt’s.
Uploaded 2004-2005. He returns to certain photographs repeatedly.
June 15th
Stefan asks me to delete my public photographs of us from my facebook.
July ???
July 2nd.
(I was obviously aware this is me.)
July 29th
He goes to Atlantic City with another woman, her bag visible. (He doesn’t post it online until September 1st.) [flickr]
August 1st
I email Stefan about his trip to Atlantic City. It was the first time in two and a half years that we didn’t have daily contact.
August 4th
I send Stefan a love letter with drawings.
A gift of gif.
and the words to go with it…
I think that has already happened.
I think I’ve already had my chest torn asunder, the ivory of ribcage effortlessly cracked apart and spread open like a book, ripped this bleeding throbbing pulpy damaged mess from it’s fortress of flesh and bone, and held the slippery fragile thing in my hands, arms slowly stretching out in your direction.
I just hadn’t fully realised.
There are words we don’t particularly use, you and I… and I’m not even sure such words would be appropriate. They sound, to me, so frail and saccharine, these gossamer sentiments that most people exchange. Flimsy nonsense that tastes of nothing but the pink of cotton candy.
But you?
The hues that you resonate within me are not a bucolic and pallid palette of pastels, no dreamy colors of a serene dawn. Oh, you do make me burst forth in an encyclopedia of color, all colors, true… But for you, towards you, at you, it is… the very deepest red.
More blood red than blood. More vibrant than an apocalyptic sunset. It is a color that has the tactile sensation of electricity, the pain-pleasure of a passionate purity all it’s own.
It is as though I’ve torn free of the shackles that bound me, looked no further at the shadows that danced in front of my fixed gaze, was able to escape from Plato’s cave, and could look upon this abstract-concept-emotion in it’s truest form, the thing of perfection, the thing itself. And while most sit happily manacled and muzzled, looking in awe at the substanceless shadow of a facsimile distortedly dancing before them, audaciously claiming it as their own, naming it, sapping away any meaning or vibrance it may have still possessed….. I’ve actually glimpsed the true thing, I’ve touched it, held it in my hand, felt my body ablaze in the agonizing ecstasy it exudes. It filled me with frost-fire.
You’ve done that to me.
No…. No, I hadn’t fully realised. But I had been inching forward. I had been speaking in this direction for some time. I’d used flesh as my language, and had been writing you sonnets with my tongue… narrated novels of worship with my hips…. using my bare skin to grow more and more naked before you.
So why am I explaining all of this to you?
Because it only just came to me. I only just realised the depth and breadth of it all, like suddenly discovering the entire ocean exists. I am putting this to words as best as I can, because you should know, being the object of it.
Why now?
Perhaps because, in that recent moment of thought-doom stopped dead in my tracks, those few seconds before brain recalibration, I became for the first time aware that I’d be utterly decimated if you were to share your flesh with another.
Perhaps because, now that I have my time with you so truncated these days, I can feel the empty space around the edges in the places you used to fill, and I can feel how painfully it aches.
Perhaps because I so rarely have the opportunity to express this aspect since I’ve moved; I no longer am in a position to pour my emotions towards you through the sensual-physical as often or freely as I used to, so my lexicon is forced to adapt from flesh to words and fill the gap.
Perhaps because I’d decided, the day before yesterday, that I had to kiss you when next I saw you, somehow, somewhere, whenever you next came by to see me, which seems expressly against our general style of interaction.
I understand that is by no means what you signed on for, and isn’t entirely fair.
But I seem to have already hollowed out my innards. I seem to have already left a box on your doorstep; a box that seeps blood.
I’m really sorry.
…. I didn’t mean to fall.
Rachael
PS.
You are, of course, my best friend, and i’d hope that you would still be willing to remain as such. I would hate if my emotional over-exuberance were to destroy the excellence of our friendship. You are the best person I’ve ever known, and will continue to be so.
I would ask you, as my friend… desperately beg you….
that if this present of mine is not something you’ve the mind to care for, if you are not interested in being the caretaker of my canoptic jar of passion-rapture-self, if you’ve no desire to be part of this offering, please please please keep yourself at a chaste distance from me. I doubt myself able, at this point, to share my body with yours without showering you with amorous adulations through every single touch. I’d ask that you spare me such embarrassment and torture. I will want to, oh GOD will I want to… but it would only make things terrible for both of us.
Please let me know.
Otherwise, if I can gather up the nerve, I might try to kiss you. While not at bedtime or even wearing my pajamas.
voice mails, text messages, facebook comments ,seconds after you wrote something, and now……email. I am desperately trying to spend the first day of cool weather with you……my insides are eating themselves……please, get back to me.
The pattern of the tablecloth inspires the demon tail and feathered wings, as does the fabric over the back of the chair.
September 6th
I question why, after months of isolation at my Aunt’s house, I’m not welcome to stay with Stefan for a night. He answers without answers.
September 13th
Chicago, one month prior.
Again, the horns inspired by the curves of his hat.
September 25th
A photo from 2007 taken as a possible home page for the Sticky Friends site. His hand again, the phone cord mimicked in his arm tattoo, the bluejeans repeated, the mats on the floor like my open pants zipper. [fb]
Two self portraits from 2006 shortly before Stefan and I started.
He combines me.
October 8th
I think he’s recreating a drawing I’d made of his Myspace name and status when we’d first met? [fb]
October 9th
He posted both of these photos, taken at my Aunt’s house. [fb] [fb]
October 14th
An email exchange between Stefan and I, when he rejected my romantic notions.
October 22nd
An email exchange after he’d finally admitted that he’d been “seeing other women”. I tried desperately to be his platonic friend, but my heartbreak and betrayal sparked in him rageful deflection.
Three days apart. His [flickr] was first, actually. [flickr]
October 26th
I send a sad email to Stefan about the way things are.
My photo below was taken just a month prior to his Halloween party.
The double exposure eyebrows make the clown makeup shape, my grin similar to the clown. He talked his friend into wearing that specific clown costume for the Halloween party, and then recreates the photo that inspired that choice. [fb]
I co-hosted his 2008 Halloween party, but by the following year, I did not attend. I was told our thrice weekly physical relationship of the past should not resume and that I should assume he was seeing other women. I couldn’t bear going to his party, not knowing which women surrounding him were my replacement.
My/our 2008 photos on the left, his 2009 on the right. [fb]
The measuring cups in the foreground of his photo to recreate the green of light of mine.
This photo of Stefan was not from Halloween, but he recreated it.
That photo he’d sent me of a door in his house:
A photo I’d sent him of cool street finds from the Ocean Grove days:
He’d taken the birdcage for his apartment, seen behind his Halloween guests, placed purposely next to a painted door.
Again, the female figure on the painted door in the background is a combination of these two Ocean Grove photographs:
The circle graphic behind the silhouette inspired by the shape and colors of the globe of the lamppost combined with the vintage pendant lamp beside the cage.
October 28th
November 1st
While I didn’t attend the party, we did spend Halloween together later that week, just the two of us. We took many photos.
He only posts photos online without me in them. [fb]
November 4th
Email from Stefan
I wish I wasn’t slaving over client bullshit. I’m insanely behind. I didn’t realize the caliber of my slacking until today.
I also wish we were gnawing meat right now. I liked that place in Bloomfield.
Thank you for your funding our Halloween fun again. That was a lot of dough for three days…..but….I wouldn’t trade a second and I’d pay double if I had to.
Back to drawing.
Email from me
Yes yes yes yes. Thank you for a fabulous Halloween weekend.
You do make me happy. The very happiest.
I’m sorry you’re slammed and behind, but at least you’re attending to your stuff and catching up. That’s a positive thing. I, too, have been slacking, and have a pounding head that makes for a lot of the not-so-fun.
Besides, this is probably good timing. I mean, the weekend was an awesome escape from everything and has made me a joyous person indeed, but the conversation (started on the phone and meant to continue in person, in the dark somewhere) never happened.
That’s ok.
I feel like we deserved a fucking awesome happy time, dammit. Christ, we are awesome, and we think each other is awesome, so why shouldn’t we get to have AWESOME time?!? And, I know that you are still figuring stuff out and thinky. But I hope you’ll let me know when you feel ready to talk about things so we can hang out again and figure things out together.
yes. too – geh – thur. And nicely.
I’ll be quiet over here, til then, with the photograph of me on your back as my happy place.
In the meantime, we can both… kick the ass of some mundane life stuff.
la.
November 6th
Stefan lies to my face about the night he said he wished we were together eating meat.
On facebook, I’d viewed the other woman inviting <The Brother> to see Fiery Furnaces that evening, but he replied that he had to work and couldn’t attend.
Message from me to a friend
I wasn’t going to hang with Stefan anymore… til we could talk. I told him as much. So he came by, which I thought meant he wanted to talk about things. Which he didn’t. He just wanted to hang.
He mentioned he’d gone to see Fiery Furnaces at Maxwells. He went out of his way to explain that <The Brother> had asked to use his card to buy tickets, so he just told him to get HIM one too, and so they two of them went in to see the show really quick like, just in and out.
Wow.
Total lies.
November 8th
Here’s us the night before Halloween at a Haunted Hayride, the aforementioned photo of me on his back. [fb]
His T-Rex arms, our heads combined to create the dino-head, my glasses for the big eyes. [wayback]
His photograph of the Killer Klown (representing me) at his party. He then draws it. [wayback]
November 9th
We’d gone to a Diner in Jefferson for rare meat on October 4th. [flickr]
September 2009. He brings me to Garrett Mountain. [flickr]
Our faces combined, with scarfed away chins. [tumblr]
November 11th
The undiagnosed brain fluid leak starts to increase in intensity. I suspect my hysterical sobbing over Stefan ruptured my poorly healed spinal tap from a few months prior. A new tick bite from my Aunt’s back yard has brought new Lyme symptoms. Migraine medication isn’t working, and doctors are just throwing more pills at it.
email from me
by the way, so you needn’t worry that terrible things are happening to me and you don’t know… I made sure my Aunt Mary has your number in her phone, and told her that if anything ever happsns to me, to call you first. And to tell the doctors you are my hyspband, if that’s what needs to happen..
I wonder if I put a note in my walled next to my health insurance card… so if I got in some car accidnet, they’d see it ?
gosh. head pressure building. migraine meds clearl didn’t work.
chris.t
email from Stefan
I’d eat you if you died.
email from me
that made my shy parts smile.i…. i would save your tongue for last. as a final passionate devouring kiss.
email from Stefan
I’m glad I read that right before this guy is coming over. I needed some brain energy and the coffee isn’t really doing it. Umm….I may draw what you just said.
I like these ideas….all but for the part that we need to die, for them to happen.
November 12th
I’d been doing some corporate photography while truly struggling with heartbreak and the beginnings of the years-long headache. Stefan felt betrayed that I’d managed to pull my sobbing sickly self together and manage to get some decent paying photography work, and manage to smile in one of the photos.
He used various private flickr photos I’d uploaded as his reference to paint one of the men who hired me …
… and then recreated my photo of that fellow peering from behind another. [fb]
My old cat Mister Mangles from 2007, and Stefan’s new stray. [flickr]
His caption: “She’s…..gotta go. Though, I don’t want her to. She escaped my roommates room and opened my door. She pounced on my bed in complete darkness and just adjusted herself to my shape and stretched up against me. That’s hard to let go.” [flickr]
WHY did she have to go if you didn’t want her to?!?
A photo he had asked me to take for painting reference a year earlier, vs his own new recreation. [flickr]
Two months prior. My smiling during a photo gig when claiming to struggle with headache and heartbreak filled Stefan with accusation and suspicion. [flickr]
My image from two weeks prior, holding a heading pad to the back of my head in ever worsening Lyme Disease / brain leak headache. [flickr]
A photograph of old friends uploaded three days prior [flickr]
and an old childhood photograph and a Sticky Friends photo from months prior in July.
He combines us, the post inspired by my recent photo, the details from the older two images. [tumblr]
His caption: Happy Thanksgiving Be thankful for your friends. Even if you find them grotesque, don’t forget who carried your weight when you needed a lift. A picture of a father giving his son a piggy back ride inspired this. I don’t really like the perspective…..or the drawing. I’ll be redrawing this.
November 30th
An email exchange about gifts in the mail and missing each other.
Stefan and I are trying to stay distant, because I just keep asking and crying and he keeps not having any answers. But we miss each other. So we email. We email sweetly, then defensively, then sweetly again.
I care for you in a ineffable way, (which is why emails, are not suited for these things) meaning you are indeed who I would be with in all ways if I thought I could handle that right now. I would shovel all others aside for you, like coal in a furnace…..if I thought I was capable of that kind of commitment. I am still sick……and have been on my own venture to figure out what is wrong with me. As….you have.
December 17th
Fox Fest 2007.
Aunt becomes Santa, windows become soldier hats, facial expressions from kids. [tumblr] “Love, Stef”
