This is the first picture taken of me as a 40 year old. I had just turned my back on my birthday sunrise and was headed home.
But what about me? I thought. Where am I in all of this? I asked my camera.
Sure there are selfies these days, but I chose a classic shadow shot like the one I clicked in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico when I was the only human for miles and miles in the middle of frost-crusted gypsum crystals, back before phones went and got smart.
Like selfies shadow shots are all about the angle. With my back to the light, I grew like a giant. My resting bag became a club foot. My image overlaid the footprints of strangers who had come and gone to the beach the day before.
How marvelous to catch a shadow and make it behave— that constant companion, wily but forgettable, permanent and transient, always dodging me or stepping in my path, the shape that is me and not-me according to the distortion of the sun. In a split second I became windswept sea grass, trampled sand, and the darkness which defines the direction of light.
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