Where We Almost Were I

A figure walks the forest path, not quite solid, not quite gone. Caught mid-stride in a blur, they dissolve into the grain of the world, like thought half-remembered or breath in cold air. They are someone—but also anyone, or no one at all. The photograph doesn’t document them; it reveals their passage, like footprints in a dream. What you see is not the person but their possibility, sketched in light and motion.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.” These images are that river’s skin—slippery, reflective, and ephemeral. The camera becomes not a recorder, but a diviner. The forest, meanwhile, stands timeless, waiting, absorbing each brief encounter like a secret.