About ‘Pomegranates’
October 2023 and all the Pomegranate fruits are dead. By dead, I mean eaten; devoured by a creature, perhaps bird, perhaps squirrel, perhaps Persephone herself. They hung on the tree, hollow and rotting. I picked them all — as if they’d been ripe — and peered into the basket. It seemed fitting that the tree — which every year, for the past five years, has been burgeoning without incident — had been consumed. The fruits offering sustenance to something or someone else. Not me. Not…us.
“Us.” Meaning me and my partner of 7.5 years. Our relationship, as we know it, ended three weeks prior. We were not married, but it still feels like a divorce: me packing my things, me alone in a house I don’t own, me staring into a basket of hollowed-out fruit.
The worst part is that nothing “bad” happened; no betrayal, no devastating event, no reason to hate or be angry. There is still so much love between us, which makes it even more baffling that our partnership needed to end. I’ve never had a breakup like this, one with so much kindness and conversation and gentle care. Perhaps that’s a testament to our friendship and the growth we’ve done together.
I’d gone back-and-forth about whether I wanted to publicly mention the breakup. It’s so fresh, and things can change so quickly; reconciliation is not off the table. But this grief colors everything I do, everything I create, not to mention the place where I’m living. The next few months will be a process of elimination, as I travel around Greece to decide what’s next: what city to call home, what landscape to nest into. I’ve entered a season of grief — alternating between hope and rage, love and sorrow, self-forgiveness and regret. Like Persephone consuming the seed, that burst of sweet and crunch of bitter is a portent of a new life.
I wasn’t sure what would happen when I setup the camera. I’m not a “photographer”; I’ve not studied light or composition. I just poured those rotting fruits on the ground, wrapped myself in a shawl, and knelt like a supplicant, like a beggar, like a starving creature with nothing to guard but a collection of useless fruit and an aching, sunken heart.
This is not where I thought I would be on the cusp of forty. Looking at my body, touching my skin, and hearing all the insecurities of a person, single, “at my age.” I don’t want children; I’m grateful, at least, that there’s no “ticking clock”. But all that was going through my head as I setup the camera was a need to look at myself, not objectively, but with a different eye: to see myself as raw and starving and alone. And to know that that, somehow, can be beautiful, too.
