Like Smoke, Like Memory III

Long limbs stretch slightly skyward in this frame, like branches remembering how to bloom. There is joy—not loud, not gleeful, but quiet and deep—like the joy of air returning to thawed soil. The mask offers no emotion, yet the entire image radiates presence. Walter Benjamin once described memory as a light that doesn’t shine forward, but glows behind us. The figure here glows like that: part echo, part witness.