neither fully of the earth nor free of it.

The shadow of something pale and cold against silk, light gathering at the edges, overcast. A duel with its back turned, a frozen moment of stillness, each gazing outward, away, the recognition of what lies between dissipating as each follows its gaze inward. Powdery and rooted and chilled, somber as cut stems left too long in cold water, as roots pulled halfway from dark soil, neither fully of the earth nor free of it. The same flower meeting itself from opposite sides of the membrane. Each one a version of the same thing: two that are one, neither fully one thing nor the other, caught in that charged space between. At the back, a molassesy brown sugar darkness, fungal and sweet, the earth already in quiet conversation with what stands above it. Something close to the work of an artist of constructed selves, of thresholds, of becoming and unbecoming: the white mask held to the blank sky, the foliage climbing the legs inch by inch, the landscape making its slow, patient claim on a body that moves through it. A ghost caught between breaths, already deep in tender negotiation with what waits beneath the soil, a surrender so private and so deliberate it feels indecent to witness. The presentiment of something not yet arrived but already, somehow, complete.