Where We Almost Were VI

There is a hush in these images—not silence, but a quiet full of motion. Blurred outlines speak of lives unfolding just beyond reach. The forest does not frame the walkers; it consumes and reveals them, like a memory half-recalled. Each step they take pulls the world slightly out of shape, like gravity in a dream. The path is not linear—it loops, folds, and disappears.

You are not just the photographer here. You are the one who lingers behind, the shadow on the ground, the trace of awareness that notices what others pass. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” These images search for that lost poetry—the strange and nearly-seen verse of shared but unspoken passage.

Some images feel like a breach—like a thin place between dimensions. These photographs do not show people; they show possibilities: other versions, lost timelines, spectral lives. The forest becomes the mechanism of uncertainty. It filters each presence until they are more sensation than identity.

The shadow appears again—your shadow, perhaps. A witness within the frame is always one step outside. Is it a self-portrait or an apparition? These questions echo through the leaves. Haruki Murakami once said, “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.” And yet here, it seems you’ve done just that.

The camera did not capture a moment. It opened a portal. And from that fissure stepped all the selves we almost were.