The four of us are dying

It’s the tale of the New Year’s Eve and the four of us are sitting on the bed. We are kind of trying to bond because we are still tripping but there is just no chemistry between us at this point. The night was troubled and in contraposition to E’s drama it even felt boring at times. N came to me a couple of times drowning in oxytocin, apologising for always treating me like shit, and I just told him that it didn’t matter. That’s the thing, when I care, I care so much it hurts, and I love it; when I decide it’s not worth it anymore, I leave the void behind me as I move forward so fast you haven’t even noticed I am gone. Besides, I never trust what people say when they are on drugs unless those things have been said and shown repeatedly in a sober kind of setup.

C is asking questions to L and she just can’t connect, I know her, I don’t need an altered state of mind to see every little shift in her, that’s her beauty, absolute transparency. She tells me she feels panicky so I hold her hands and remind her to breathe slowly and deeply. C and N seem fascinated by this moment, monkey see monkey do.

And then I have a fucking hole in my memory and I don’t remember what was said but at some point I was forced to out myself and justify a statement of mine. I always had a suspect that N was jealous of L because of all the time we spent together, and the nights I spent at hers because he was being an absolute impossible agglomerate of repressed anger and violence. Now that N’s filters are down, he shows his true colours.

C or N insinuate something in regard of a potential sexual connection between me and L, something like that, I don’t remember what exactly they said and why... Perhaps a hidden desire? I deny whatever they are saying and N says “Yeah you wish” as if to say ‘I know you’d like to fuck her’, with a sleazy tone in his voice. What the actual fuck?

So I say “Oh, I think L is incredibly beautiful and attractive, but she is my best friend, I am not sexually attracted to her”. Done. Absolute pure crystal truth and yet I feel dirty inside. I feel violated and disrespected and I don’t know what’s happening and how we’ve got here, therefore I can’t protect my best friend from this unfair attack either; on top of everything, I hate that this mother fucker manipulated me, yet again, into outing myself and exposing something that is none of anyone’s business, perhaps not even L’s.

That sat with me for more than a year now and I’ve been obsessing over the details I can’t remember... But does it matter?
L and I discussed the matter afterwards and we agreed that it was a fucked up thing to do. We’re cool as usual. The problem was the memory that kept bubbling up time to time, and I couldn’t understand why it was bothering me so much, and why I’d become tense and irritated, worried and at times paralyzed because of it. I have an answer for myself now: trauma.

More than a year of my life has gone to shit and only I know how hard it was, and how many times things like this happened because of N. I know, and L knows because she saved me countless times. I wasn’t aware of how bad it was until I was out of it, but the moment I realised I probably needed to get out of that relationship was when my best friend was dragged into the mud too. You touch my family, the most precious circle of people I’ve chosen, you are going to be left in the vacuum of that void that you created in my heart.

Fuck you. I am not ready to forgive. I will never forget.

I evolve until I am me again

It’s incredible what I am capable of when I allow myself to just be myself. I try to define at least one aspect of my freedom and sexuality, almost force my brain to pigeonhole and compartmentalise how my body perceives desire. It’s a safe space to be, even if for a moment, if I allow nobody but me to dissect my emotions.

Then the walls start growing closer and smaller and I can’t fucking breathe, that’s how I know it’s time to move on. I wonder if I ever shed any of the bits and pieces on the way, because I always feel some entity running behind me, as if they wanted to give me something I dropped on the ground, something that I didn’t realise I even had... let alone needed.

I hate it when someone doesn’t have an updated version of me with them, which is often the case because I evolve very quickly, I get bored and I don’t want to waste my precious time in explaining who I am now. And to be brutally honest with myself and you, I don’t even fucking know who I am. But I know what I want and I am good at communicating that, I have no intention to compromise on my pleasure, which is an absolute priority in life in whichever form it comes.

It is frustrating when I know what somebody else wants but they will not tell me, they will expect me to take responsibility and expose myself. I fear rejection too, but I fear the lack of satisfaction even more. So I am always the most vulnerable. And that makes me stronger, and lonelier, and that’s ok.

There is too much fire for one person, I don’t know how to channel all of it, so for the majority it keeps burning from inside, and I never run out; I go insane and I hate my nature for making me so weak and dependent on someone else’s air to let it flow, or the earth itself to ground me. I am exhausted of this feeling, the never-enough sensation under my skin. One day I will make one step too far and it’s going to be over, the world will stop, I’ll burn all the oxygen left in my lungs and will become ashes myself.

It’s never an addiction, it’s never been about that. There is simply too much of me for myself. When I get that feeling that someone is following me because I dropped my will to carry on, I only see a mirror at the end of the corridor, and if I step back to get closer to myself, I stop evolving, and I would never forgive myself for that. So, I just keep walking away from my own reflection.

I evolve until I am me again. It’s terrifying.

My self-portraits

I am going to tell this story once more and then close that door until there is an internal reason to open it again. I don’t know why it started, but I remember when and how and in retrospect I definitely know how it evolved and enriched me.

I was studying photography at school and the most interesting part to me was to shoot our monthly home assignment. I didn’t have a clue of what the fuck to do exactly, I’d just grab my camera and play with the light. I once took Julia to the seaside and shot some close-ups of her eyes and only later found out I was in love with her. There was the sea reflected in her eyes and I thought it was such a privilege to be able to see that and keep the memory forever.

That was just about it. Random details, portraits, flowers, streets, travels.
During that time, my best friend Alessia asked me to help her out with her assignment. She wanted to represent the seven sins and wanted me to model, so I did, it was fun. We then thought about how to represent Lust and I told her I had an idea but I’d shoot that myself and just pass her the files.

It was a sunny morning, the light through the window poured onto my bed and I just decided to bath in it. I lied on my back, covered my breasts and waited ten seconds for the shutter to close. There it was, the key that opened my entire life to me.
Alessia got maximum votes, my own assignment was some light-paint abstract stuff that didn’t have much meaning, and I was left with the image of me in a way I’ve never seen myself before. Nothing else mattered.

I started taking more pictures, half naked or wearing some cheap PVC fetwear. Either way, I felt alive and like I had a purpose in life. I didn’t have a plan, I was just doing and expressing my sexuality. Shortly afterwards, I published some of those photos on MySpace and a handful of photographers reached out, so I started my modelling career and left the camera in a drawer for years.

Almost six years ago I moved to London and brought my Zenit with me. Slowly I began to shoot again. It was boring, something was missing, so I asked my friends to pose for me, properly, in the intimacy of their homes, the less clothes the better. I wasn’t able to explain why, I just followed my instinct. I was fed up with photographers focusing more on their environment than the subject, I wanted my models to feel special, like these images really wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for them, but at the same time I felt like I was losing myself in the process. I wanted my photography to be more about me because I felt so lost, and lonely, and hurt...

I entwined my needs and channelled my energies into one person: myself. It was a way to express beauty and eroticism at first, or a way to capture the light the way I saw it when no one else did. Then, it became a habit. I think it was also a way of controlling at least one aspect of my life and my sexuality, I had no idea it was some sort of PTSD recovery in itself.

A couple of years ago I ended up in a relationship that destroyed the last bit of vitality in me, and it’s a long story that I can feel now completely behind me, but it’s not a pleasant memory. Few month prior me moving in with that person, I started a Patreon self-portrait project to at least cover my art expenses, and I kept doing that throughout my relationship. It saved me.

I shot an analogue series every month and it was a religious appointment with myself, a strong commitment that could fight its way through the fog of my own disappearance. I didn’t have any privacy or a healthy space to create and yet I kept shooting, I even managed to photograph some models. I kept writing and I directed my first film for XConfessions; on the tale of that fucked up relationship, I wrote the treatment for my second film for someone, anyone, it became my second film for Erika Lust. I keep creating even when there is no one to pitch to, or nowhere concrete to go, because when the opportunity arises, I am ready, and I learned it through isolation and pain; not much scares me anymore.

As soon as my emotional struggles were over and that person was out of my life, the urge to pose for myself ended. I started going out more, fucking people, expressing everything I needed and wanted. I think that shooting self-portraits was a way of dealing with sexual repression, it was a safe space in which I allowed myself to feel erotic. Now, when I feel lonely or like something is stuck and I can’t let it out, I masturbate and film myself and the energy is the same, I just become freer because I don’t have to pose in a sinuous fictitious way.

I am now so rough and raw and unstoppable; framing myself and waiting for those rolls to be developed and scanned before they end up in my hands, is not enough. Nothing is enough anymore. I evolve so quickly, by the time I look at a self-portrait it’s not me anymore. So a digital video approach is what I need to channel the mess I’m in. Therefore, no more self-portraits. Too much thinking and counting and framing.

My focus are p()rn, sex, pain, BDSM, and posing for someone else because they must see something I wouldn’t notice myself, and I don’t care for it to be pretty, I just want it to be true to the moment. As true as a photograph can be. None of this makes sense, and it doesn’t have to, and the only fucks I want to give are the physical ones. I have no time for pretty shallow pictures because I am no creature of the past.

Photos by Dimitri Autrement

I feel gravity

I love to write on commission, it really pushes my limits, I learn, I become a better human, I refine my art, I feel like I have the right to be. I know it’s silly to validate myself through glimpses of success defined by other people’s targets and requirements but one step at a time... I look back, and I don’t compromise anymore.

I do not compromise unless I can learn from it and get closer to who I want to be. And who I want to be is who I really am, deep inside, when no one is watching but I wish that everyone was. And I overshare in despair and I complain and kick and scream and push everyone away so that I am a raw and violent and angry sentence spit on a piece of paper.

I cuddle by touching my own hand, so thin and graceful. Is that how the others feel me? I only remember my mother taking my hand and observing it, describing it with such love it hurts, because it’s not someone else’s fetish but a result of that screaming and pushing. I want to go back inside.

When I am tied up and suspended, it feels like going back with the gravity of my knowledge. The rope pushes against my hips and my body is pulling to the ground but it can’t touch it. I let go and can feel my blood bubbling and boiling inside my veins, and I imagine I am in space, further and further away from Earth.

I feel his hands and fingers slipping through between the rope and my skin, and that millimetre of space feels infinite. Please don’t let go. Tighter. Closer to me. Don’t let me go. I close my eyes and I am genderless, one leg being pulled higher and more open, helpless, ecstatic. No more closed poses because that little girl is dead and I am going to fight for myself by exposing my flesh and my will to live.

I don’t know how I ended up talking about my rope sluthood but that’s the beauty of journal writing, I am free and I define my rules by just following my circular style, and the ones that resonate with my stories just read them. I always come back to the point I’ve started from, because the universe probably repeats itself somehow but all I know is gravity.