2024 - 001 Musing | Refaith
Refaith is not a real word. I guess it is now since I blurted it out in the open.
In this very moment I’m thinking of a little post I made in an old blog some eight years ago. It was about my dream of owning a camera and learn to do good photography. I never mentioned the word camera or photography in that blog post. Because of shame. Or awkwardness—if I’m allowed to sugarcoat the word shame. It was as awkward as the scene from a SpongeBob episode where Squidward visited in the dead of night the tomb of his hopes and dreams.
The essay begun with words: “I was the faith you lost.” Random words that I thought of after I snapped a picture of a little star pulsating in the night sky. My friends and I were out and strolling around the vicinity of Esplanade one humid night. When I looked up to admire the dome of the theater there was a star right above me. It was alone. It was clinging for its place in a heaven swamped by man-made shimmer. It was picture perfect as I saw it but not so much with what I’ve captured in my phone.
As the night progress, I kept thinking that maybe owning a camera and having photography as a hobby was a far fetch dream. And to make the story short, the random words and the photo I took became a short essay, a eulogy for a dream. I also admit now what I wrote was a testament to victimhood and learned helplessness. I know for a fact that most creative pursuits has nothing to do with fancy tools, photography included. And also, back then I was still insecure when my ex-boyfriend took photography as a hobby before me. I was really hung up. Lol.
In the essay On Keeping a Notebook, Joan Didion wrote that we must make peace with every version of us that we shed whether we like them or not, “otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
I don’t have unannounced visits at 4 a. m. No one is banging on the mind’s door.
Maybe because no one was really buried that night. I might have no camera. I have zero skills to take nicer photos up until today. But I still see myself expressing with a shutter one fine day.
However this post is really not about photography. It has to do with writing. Gasps!
Writing is the one that I’ve shed. I didn’t not even grieve for it like what I did to photography. It’s the thing that carries a crowbar following my footsteps at night.
And so with one palm on the another, eyes close, on my knees, we pray for forgiveness and supplication.