Trace Elements
You’re gonna sail across the ocean
In a boat built for one
Keep dry and stay near the sun...1
—Polvo, Fast Canoe
2019—2022
Compiled in 2024
Photography (B/W), Text
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The fog doesn’t lift all at once.
It beads and clings like condensation on a bathroom mirror.
Droplets form, slide, and leave trails.
Sometimes I imagine taking a hairdryer to it—
watching the surface clear in streaks,
revealing something underneath I hadn’t realised I’d been missing.
A line of possibilities begins to take shape:
practical thoughts—
coffee, shower, tidy up—
running alongside deeper lines of concern.
It usually takes me a few days to notice the change.
I move through the house without dropping anything or nudging anything over.
There’s a deftness to my movements.
I’m more deliberate with things.
Depressive spells are just that—
spells of time.
They, too, shall pass—
like the dull regret that follows a fast food meal.
Within depression, things are not all bad.
Nor is it right to say that it’s about sadness.
It’s more nuanced than that.
There are different sides to it—
it can embrace me with the familiarity of an old friend,
or hurt me in ways that only something close can.
Mine’s been diagnosed as dysthymia.
It sounds like the name of a Narnian nymph.
Or the title of a diss track.
Etymologically, it’s rooted in Ancient Greek:
dys—difficult, bad;
thymia—soul, spirit, mood.
It’s considered a low-level chronic depression—
Not acute, but persistent.
Mine waxes and wanes like the moon’s phases.
The water’s boiling.
But I’m not ready to move.
Instead, I watch the hillside through the window.
Greens shift subtly as the day moves across their surface.
It’s still today, though the lighter fronds of the palms tremble in the lazy breeze.
A certain kind of beauty becomes visible in the slow hours of a depressive period.
It seeps through my consciousness.
Maybe it’s a kind of stillness—
not passive, but attentive.
A form of clarity.
A moment of solace that insists gently:
‘Even now, this is the world, and you’re still in it.’
Depression blurs the edges of things.
Time, sense of self, memory—
they lose their outlines.
Days slip past in a soft cinema cross-fade.
But the camera, complicit as it may be,
doesn’t ask me to explain myself.
It only asks me to look.
I take it up on its offer.
We’re wired to find patterns,
to pull meaning from repetition and rhythm.
Even a commute becomes a kind of lyric—
a beat we move to without knowing—
a song we’ve heard too many times,
like the relentless Don Donki refrain, or the fluorescent playlist echoing through Wellcome’s isles.
Sometimes, I think of photographs as degraded transmissions.
Like traces of things past.
Complete with eraser shavings.
They’re not for solving anything.
They don’t explain.
But they do mark something:
a presence—
fractured,
out of order,
only ever partial,
and more often than not,
broken.
There are days when the sun bleaches the world’s details, like coral reefs in ever-warming tides.
Other times, darkness settles in—
not with violence,
but like a slowly drawn curtain.
Eventually, our eyes adjust.
Details emerge.
I’d like to live in a world of balance.
And I think, sometimes, I can see a path there.
On days when I float through the world like someone else’s idea—
transparent, perhaps a little out-of-sync.
And also on days when I don’t.
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Footnote:
1 Polvo, Fast Canoe, written and performed by Eddie Watkins, Steve Popson, Dave Brylawski, Ash Bowie, produced by Bob Weston from Exploded Drawing (Touch and Go; 1996).