A Theory of Oneness

The ghost walks home alone. She does not weep. She does not long. She does not know. The grass has no knowing, the dirt has no feeling. She slips through timespans, floating in and out of a menagerie of memories that once held her consciousness together in some previous dimension. Glazed. Gooey. Moments whose linearity have really no place here. Moments that simultaneously speed up and slow down, fast forward and reverse, a glowing ticker tape reel of memories twinkling like one giant spiral of atoms - projecting a mass that envelops every single last degree that perception can withstand. Engulfment. Sticky primordial ooze.

The ghost walks home alone. She walks, and she waits, although she isn't quite sure what for. Suspended. Shrouded. Toiling through time like the dense fog of the morning, surely existing and yet - ungraspable. A terrible feeling of being very ungraspable.

The ghost walks home alone. She does not dream. She does not want. She waits to feel anything. She waits. She waits. She waits. She is the last white wisp of hair on the scalp of a dying man. And then, a stray white feather being carried away by the wind on the beach. Now with a willingness to equally suspend all belief and disbelief in everything and nothing. Everything is and nothing is. A theory of oneness. Suspending all, not stuck in the ooze of drifting in and out of the gravity of her memory cycle - orbiting her own echoes like a planet encircling a star, sweeping closer and quicker to the nearest black hole at every turn around the hot, hot sun. Why resist? Her thoughts - static fragments from some lost satellite - beeping, beeping - sending data nonetheless as it drifts further and further away from the Great Planet Earth.

The ghost walks home alone. She is in no hurry at all. She waits. Time is not not real but time is very inconceivable, too much and not enough at the same time. Eons waltz in front of her, beside her, and inside of her, a millennia happening in the span of a single second's breath. She is stretched and she is squished. She is still and she is spinning. Time is no longer understood by the ghost, only happening to her, and she is guided towards only the inward spiral called home, home, home. The blackness at the center of the universe. The subconscious nothing. Oneness.

The ghost walks home, alone, and arrives in the same place she started.

*

This photo was taken in 2018 during a spur of the moment, 10-minute photoshoot. My friend Delaney and I were hanging out when I suddenly had the strong desire to shoot this image.

"Do you want to go to the park with me like, right now and shoot this ghost photo?" I asked. "No getting ready! I have a sheet, just throw it on!"

"Okay!"

Now, I will say once we got there and started shooting, we instantly felt ridiculous LOL, she was flailing around trying to be a spooky, scary ghost and I was clicking away, she couldn't see. It was hilarious, and a fun Halloween memory that I'll keep forever. :)

The sheet we used was actually a light blue rather than stark white. I thought that since I would be shooting in monotone on my Canon, the blue tone would give it a deeper, more grey feel. It definitely did. When I plan to have a photo be black and white I like to shoot it in actual black and white in my camera - I always think that makes it somehow more silky. The editing on this shot was pretty minimal aside from some basic contrast and deepening the tones. We took about 50 shots, but I narrowed it down to this one with some intense curative artistic whittling.

This is my first post on Vocal Media, so please feel free to leave a comment or constructive note. Let's be friends! Happy October, everyone. -Samantha