the body issue

Being thin and flat chested

I felt like the Other,

walking, mumbling

merely existing on the margins,

trying to hold on, to remember

how it felt to be me beyond my

non-feminine existence

-distorted

 

My body never belonged to me,

it was always their property

to look and to devour,

to judge and to despise,

always not feminine enough.

With a thin, awkward body,

a tomboy,

the never belonging aura

hovered above my existence for

decades to come.

 

A wall kept growing around me,

till my heart turned into cement,

and hardened,

cold, grey and barely living

full of self-hate bricks.

 

Years passed,

my body swayed

back and forth,

in time’s soothing breeze.

The wall blossomed

with colorful flowers.

My body gained strength and

I managed to break the cement

with my bare hands.

The insecurity bricks were destroyed,

allowing the light of real beauty

to shine through.

 

Photo: Pentax P30, 35mm with Pentax-A 50mm F/2 SMC Lens. Kodak Gold film 200. The Netherlands, 2014.

The Old House, Kozani, GR 2013

[Photographs created during a cloudy November morning in 2013.]

Those photographs represent my childhood memories of this house, in which we lived till 1998. The most fascinating thing, seeing all those places after many years, was that everything was much smaller than I remembered! What the childhood eyes distort, the adult brain dismisses.

Kozani city, GR. Pentax P30, 35mm film.