Unquiet
Things

During a conversation with my baby sister sometime this past week, I confessed that when this business with my late grandparents’ estate is over, my grand plan was to fake my own death and run away forever. I was only half kidding.

I want to be done with these responsibilities. With obligations. With meetings and phone calls and relaying information back and forth and second-guessing my every decision and feeling like a failure because I’m not doing it right, not doing it timely enough, not doing it the way someone else might have done it. I want to walk away and never look back and never ever have to think about this again. Faking my own death and running away to be a hermit in the mountains, without another human being (or a telephone) for hundreds of miles around, sounds super appealing to me right now. I want to disappear so that they’ll never find me. And maybe then I will finally have a chance to properly mourn.

It was with a head heavy and churning with these sorts of thoughts that I discovered the photography of Rosie Anne Prosser via her flickr account late last night. A photographer and storyteller who describes herself as a “Mountain Goat raised in The Black Mountains”, her melancholic landscapes of lonely cliffs, secluded thickets, and remote paths, the focal point a lone figure, cloaked in mists and shadows with her back to both the camera and the viewer, enigmatically, introspectively, and perhaps even a bit defiantly gazing off to somewhere else, entirely…

Well, I’m having difficulty articulating how it made me feel. It was just one of those serendipitous moments when you find something you needed to see, just when you needed to see it. Each and every image tugged at my heart and seemed to echo back to me everything that I am feeling right now, and my soul whispered to me in a language tinged with both misery and hope, “I want to go to there.” I don’t know that I can say more than that.

For now, though, you can tell them I was last seen climbing into these photos.  I will immerse myself in solitude, silence, and still, sunless days. Please don’t try to find me.

You can, however, find Rosie Anne Prosser on: flickr // instagram // facebook // tumblr

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