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Photographer: Paige Six

Our past relationships mean a lot to who we are today. It is upon mulling over such a simple and obvious sentiment that I realized that I never really understood that concept and hardly started cultivating my family relationships until I was 30. I’ve always been an idiosyncratic blip within the harmony of my family. I’m a track that gets skipped and would never make the greatest hits, the Ringo to their The Beatles. Or at least that is how it feels. So while I don’t take complete responsibility for the strained string of “relationships” that semi-survived my more than quarter of a century on Earth (I was the child in most instances, to be fair), I’ve accepted this, and so find family elsewhere. It feels like I’m an alien when we share a table, an alien with my own unique spectral sensory organs unique from their species. So they stopped inviting me to holidays, and I saw them less and less often. I’ve spent most of my life by this point orbiting them from a distance relative to Neptune to the Sun. It’s in this way that I’ve come to realize that I’m most like Pluto; never actually a planet in their Solar System, at all.

Paige Six | 12.1.20

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Photograhy: Paige Six | 2017

I don’t do drugs very often, but I smoked the other day for my birthday and totally had a philosophical and maybe even religious level of an experience. I’m mourning my mother and I think I’m trying to connect with her particles here in spacetime. I was meditating on religious art, and iconography, and how we inherit these beliefs which are all that stands between us and insanity when we’re approaching moments of *true fear. I was just about to read her prayer for the first time, and my sister called (she was the only person to call for my birthday) telling me that she was planning on making me this pie that I’d be craving all week. Life is strange, and I can totally appreciate those elements as poetic inspiration. How else do we explain them?

I had a religious experience once, when I was 14. I started to question it when I started to understand how the brain works. I don’t know what the answers are, but I do think I’m starting to understand the difference between faith and reasoning, and I hope to find that there is a way to have both. Because I find true solace in the imagery of my mother’s prayer cards. I think it’s important for people who are at the mercy of forces well beyond them to have something sacred in which they can lean on when faced with truly harrowing experiences. I don’t think we need proof of God for that to be important to many people. I also don’t think you need to believe in God to find solace in iconography, or any beautiful art, place, or person. I miss my mother dearly, and I would give anything to commune with her again.

And finally in lighter news, Abraxis Nothing who’s a fellow and talented poet over on Poetizer shared his feedback with me on *ad nauseum, “[…]to paraphrase (rip off? riff off?) Claude Shannon – ‘information is surprise.'[…]”. I have never received higher praise. I did post the poem here in my Poetry segment, however I played around with the fonts on Poetizer and I think I like that version more. I’m not sure yet.

Paige Six | 11.24.20