Table for One: Kou
Kou, 10pm, 19th Feb 2010, TWG, ION Orchard
Motionless. That was how I lay, when that fateful wave lifted and swallowed me into its belly. For about more then a minute, but what felt longer then a lifetime, my body was suspended meters above the seabed and buried meters under the lips of the wave. Its weight, like yours, as it rode against my chest, compressed my diaphragm and squeezed the last molecule of oxygen out of my lungs. This all happened around this same time of the year, in 2008 when I was surfing in Bali. It was a solo trip, one that has travelled full circle into 2010, where I find myself alone again.
That year, I embraced the euphoria of a juvenile nothing-to-lose-philosophy and a devil/god-may-care attitude as a consort. Fearless, I trudged against the currents of the sea with my surf board, taking in wave after successive wave, as if the moon's invisible gravity repelled me away from the shore. I'd travel far out enough to touch that the blank surface of the horizon where the sea and sky meet. That line would alway arrest my motion in sublime fear and pivot my gaze back towards the shore. At that distance, the people along the shore would shrink into the miniatures in a large format landscape image, and the sting of the sea salt in my eyes would create the soft rims of its tilt-and-shift focus.
In full faith of the butterfly-effect, that wave that took me seemed to have been spawned out of a soft sigh of an embalmer, whose breath would send winds to caress the the skin of the ocean, agitating it into the wrath of a wave. When that wave held me in its womb, it bid me not to breathe or move, conjuring up galons of water rushing in to fill every vacuous cavity in my body, flashing rapidly a life worth's of memory across my eyes. Finally those memories came to a rest leaving behind the residual image of a mantis frozen in prayer, with its insect hopes held in a resin of eternity.
Is this all there is?
For more then month, I coated my eyes with that same resin, blinding myself from finding single diners around me. My work sat on hiatus, until one evening, my friends awoke me to the sight of Kou sitting alone at a cafe, veiled behind a pattern frosted glass pane.
Kou looked beautiful. Her skin was plated in porcelain white and the cream in her fingers matched the china of the tea cup from which she sipped. Her eyes were charcoaled with an amalgam of the night's minerals and in our conversation she confirmed my guess that she works as a model.
Conditioned by her profession, Kou would hold her every action as I photograph her. From the moment I held up my camera, she intuitively sculpted the lithe form of her body into my cubic frame. It seemed as if in flesh she had already been captured still onto the silver halides of the film's surface.
I finished my last image of Kou and we walked out together. We chatted some more, about her job, our dogs to her lineage and her husband. Lulled by the comforting sounds of the words in our exchange, I continue to lie in that wave. I gaze up into the world above the sea's surface to see her words turning into tiny drops of water tapping curiously and dancing daintily on it.
How nice that it has started to rain.