A man sought out his home in tennessee to find the wildest of flowers. In the grove he stumbled upon he found a radiant moon flower. But as he reached down to pluck it, the jimsonweed withered away.
This story is the spottiest and hardest to recall.
John liked to drink. A lot. And the older he got the thirstier he became.
His son was actually with his grandparents for almost a month with no idea about what was going on. He came back to a half empty house and his parents crying at him.
You grew up together, although you didn’t know it at the time.
How often do you think that he ever thought about you? Probably at least a couple of times, but for his mind and ours the path to intersection was lost.
By the time you were 18 you met my mom, by the time you were 19 I was born.
At the hardest points you told me that you didn’t want me to be affected by what you were going through.You had recently seen “Life is Beautiful” and decided to turn everything into a game or an adventure.
Recently I have noticed how applicable those childhood stories are to my life now. I am the age that my parents were in those stories, and now my father, the age of his father before him, I am witnessing the cycle of the human being.
I remember a while back reading a story about epigenetics. They were talking about the external stimuli that can happen to alter genes. This means that moments in one's life can be passed on. Watching Jon’s farewell video to my dad I saw him move in very similar ways to how I move. I wonder what is left of him in me?
A gesture, a twitch, a nod, so natural to me may be in fact foreign. Like “Being John Malkovich” there may be voices in my head that I cannot hear, or choose not to. And while I may carry the remnants of a thousand faces, I am me.
When I was little I used to lose myself in the forests of colorado. On a mountain there is a canyon that splits it in two. In that perpendicular space there are remnants of my time there. I placed a rock onto the cliff side, and chucked more into the gully. I popped open spore pods and spread seeds in the meadow, and for the briefest moment I stood in the night and breathed in the woodland air. I will forever be a consequence of that place, and I am but one of many.
Photos by Jessica Chappe