Some of you know my story; others just in passing or not at all…

I’ve spent the last few years working in adult entertainment, mostly with my ex wife of almost seven years. We were married young; for forgivable but obviously flawed reasons. Now that we’ve gone our separate way’s, I’m trying to figure out how long I want to continue down the path that I’ve been on and when to take the fork in the road. I don’t regret my time in adult entertainment, I just sort of feel that I’m ready to try other things, have a different sort of adventure.

I’ve got other endeavors that while perhaps less lucrative in the short term are more fulfilling to me. I’ve been writing a memoir about my career, my life, the way that the two affect one another. I’ve gotten back to photography for the sake of capturing moments and less because I need a certain number of pictures to publish commercially in a set.

I read once that Anais Nin wrote some of her most famous work as an answer to the rigid confines of writing specifically for the tastes of her benefactor. She railed against his requests for more of this, or less of that, and the outcome became Little Birds and Delta of Venus. That’s how I feel about taking pictures at the moment; that my best work doesn’t belong to any set of fifty published to meet the quota for an adult website. It’s in the single image that I take, regardless of benefit, just because I’m inspired to do so.

That’s the thing about starting over; even if you don’t have to change everything, you often want to. It’s sometimes easier and more inspiring to just pitch it all and reinvent, rather that make your situation work in different circumstances. I sort of feel like when you make sudden, radical changes that you are denouncing the adventure you’ve been on and I’ve enjoyed mine too much to ever let anyone believe otherwise.

My paint scrapping obsession has landed me with a minor infection in my eye. Something I must have rubbed into it while cleaning the paint from the windows in my bedroom. It’s happened before and doesnt take long to clear.

I stood in front of the mirror, watching the warm compress reduce the swelling and I thought back to a girl that I loved once, who’d sat on my lap helping me find the pieces of a contact lens that had torn and were floating in my eye. I remember feeling love for her then, but we hadn’t spoken of that sort of thing. I wouldn’t tell her that I did until the end, as though it was something that shouldn’t be left unsaid, something that she needed to know; that she’d been loved. We’d agreed not to say it, but I felt like it was wrong, untruthful, selfish to keep it from her.

She sat on my lap, looking into my eye while I stared at her unblinkingly. Her hair had fallen into her face just a little and I swept it back, making her realize that I was watching her. She fished the last piece out and leaned across me to throw away the tiny pieces. I wrapped my arms around her waist and thanked her. She wrapped hers around me and rested her cheek on the top of my head.

It’s strange the moments we think of, when we consider the love we’ve had in our lives. It isn’t the perfect gift, it isn’t the perfect words, it’s the little moments, the tenderness that make us feel love, feel loved.

She’d gotten off her shift but stuck around to drink (and had been for a few hours by the time I arrived). I’d seen her a few times before; spoken to her once about the trip her mother was taking to see her for the first time in eight years. She’d had too much to drink by the time she came to me and said “Why are you here alone again”.

There were several ways that I could interpret the question, most of them dependant on my ability to surmise where her delivery had gone awry. They didn’t really change the answer though so I just said “but I’m not alone, i’m here with you, aren’t I”. She smiled slowly, laughed a little at first and then a bit more. The bartender came down and distracted her while I finished my drink and slipped out quietly into the night.