Into Relief
By. Anna Oberg
My white-haired psychology professor tells us of a girl who ends her life one midnight by dressing in dark clothes and stepping in front of a semi on an unlit stretch of highway. On a subsequent evening, I call my dad, incoherent, sobbing, car pulled to the gritty edge of a dim street, her shadowy form inhabiting a wake in my mind. I think I have seen her.
It’s profound, how this narrative pierces me. Both the way its telling hollows me out, rings through me like an echo, and how it sticks with me so vividly for years afterward.
A lapse. My thoughts sift into what everything boils down to: light and shadow. In my psyche, the story transforms into a harping metaphor, a testimony about a girl becoming shadow, giving way to darkness as she journeys one of life’s hard roads. The truck’s high beams hit her first, brightness evidencing her form, just before solid collides with solid, the way hard things clang together.
One quiet afternoon, more than a decade later, forgiving, watery light streams into my bedroom, and it occurs to me to strip off my clothes and photograph myself. It’s nothing like an epiphany, just a thought born of stillness and curiosity, idle interest in whatever might happen. It’s winter. The views are buried in white and wind, so I veer inward. I crave life, but everything the light hits is brittle and dead.
Turning the camera on myself is odd only at first. I spread out a dark sheet for a backdrop and set the timer. I sit for myself, the photographer. Folding in, knees to my chest so nothing shows, but it’s obvious. My only garment is the shadow.
As I take my own picture in black and white, weaving new patterns of light and shade, something in me shifts. My self in relief, my self-consciousness deteriorates, becoming something else—a new awareness. I materialize before my own eyes.
When I rise from posing to preview the images, I enter new territory. I am the subject, though not subject to anything but the frame. I solidify there, in the center, in the vulnerability of it. This is me, seeing myself for the first time.
***
By the time I’m in fourth grade, I’ve been dieting for a year. This is uncomfortable, or rather, discomforting, because I don’t yet know how food works. I learn quickly, and by high school, the knowledge that I can choose to eat or not eat is my primary method of exercising control. I eat five hundred calories a day for long stretches at a time.
Too much, too little. I live strictly, like a monk, between parentheses. My body exists in the gap between self and being. From either side of this chasm, I stare out, pondering wholeness.
As a young child, I am told to control what I put in my body. I am heavy, anchored by weight. I should be less. But, when I do control what I put in my body, I am told I should be more. Eat more, eat more. Please, they say. I cannot please.
In my body, I want to occupy less of the mirror, the frame. I want my hand to encircle my wrist, wrap thumb to middle finger and feel bones dwindle, thumb kissing one knuckle, then the next. In my soul, though, the terrain I walk is vast, mountains and canyons, horizons I’ll never reach. In this sweeping place, all I desire is more. To feel my weight become concrete, legitimate in this wilderness.
I can’t reconcile the two spaces. Internally, I grow, while my body shrinks, pants too baggy to hold up without a belt. Sometimes, I hurt myself—bang my head against the curb, pull out fistfuls of hair, stab a key into my scalp—acts of violence to explain my body to myself. I comprehend drastic gestures.
For decades, I study my body in the mirror as though I am split in a literal sense. My closet is a long mirror divided into sliding doors, and I stand in the middle, gazing at myself, the seam between doors a meridian, splitting the perspective. I exist in two.
Until the day I turn the camera on my own form.
***
I don’t have an external remote, so I set the timer, push the button, and move quickly, deciding on a whim what pose I will strike when the camera clicks. Then, I stop, so still, captured. Unmoving.
It’s a dawning: if light can land on something, the something it lands on has a shape of being. It is there.
Photographically, I’m trying to accomplish skin, the reality of human flesh, nothing overexposed, simply the shimmer of authenticity, the way light evidences form. I find myself in a new realm. Whatever fugue state I’ve tenanted collapses when I realize, I’m there. I am there.
***
Questions pepper my thoughts as I drive home from Denver one night. What would have happened if the light had not interceded? If I was not excavated from the darkness by my camera? Would I, instead, have been impaled by shadow? Would I too, like the girl from the psychology lecture, have dressed in black and disappeared?
An answer appears later, unexpectedly, one morning as I slouch, half covered in a quilt, journaling in my quiet hour—I know abruptly, profoundly why this girl’s story disturbs me so. Thoughts of my own disappearance, or rather, the idea that I never appear at all, pool in my consciousness.
I sit in the cold, writing it all down. These years, I’ve been thinking about this girl, because I so easily could have been her.
It takes my breath away, then, my own story, a convergence of darkness and light.
Anna Oberg is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Cleaver Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, The Maine Review, and HerStry blog.