It’s been a little bit over a month since I did my 4th Crying Experience. Everything Heather said still seems very vivid to me and I remember how nervous she was throughout the session. As for me, I was quite nervous about writing her story, because Heather writes beautiful poems and to write about her seemed intimidating as I was afraid I would fail to represent her.
Heather came to me with a very big interest in my recording of the human’s emotion. She genuinely expressed how much she liked this idea and we talked a little bit about what she wanted and her background. When she told me, she studied poetry in college as her major, I felt that this girl came from another world, the world that values spiritual being the highest, and with beings that do not need to survive the mundane needs of my own cruel reality. I added her on Facebook, and read some of the poems she wrote. They are full of stories, even like movie clips when you read them, you can see, you can smell, you can feel in between words.
Heather was not sure if she would be able to cry in front of the camera, but she really wanted to go through the experience. For me, I wanted to feel her emotion not only from her poems but also from her story, and I could sense that she needed this, so I decided to make some art with her.
About the Editorial Look
After some back and forth discussion, we settled on a butterfly themed image because Heather loved bugs, in fact her Instagram handle is called “Hettybug”. I also asked her to send me some pictures for makeup inspiration, and I happened to like the ones with colorful eyeshadow a lot.
With the magical hands of our beloved genius-Najeema, we transformed Heather into a butterfly fairy. Orange butterfly hair clips on her natural fluffy hair, colorful eyeshadows in hot pink, orange, gold and turquoise dotting on her eyelids and some lovely freckles sprinkling on her face.
Besides putting a wonderful makeup on Heather, Najeema also brought me some props-some plastic butterfly to stick on the backdrop. Part of the shoot was very difficult as the butterflies kept falling off from the fabric but Najeema tried using my fridge magnets to stabilize them since the butterflies had magnets on and it worked a lot better.
It was not the easiest session, because I had to direct Heather and fix the butterflies in the background. I sensed Heather was a bit nervous throughout the course, but I thought perhaps it was just because she was new to studio shoots. Later, I learned that her nerves were due to the story she was waiting to tell.
We also tried to photograph with a vintage mirror, and I asked Heather to write a short sentence of her poem on the mirror. She wrote “I love your orange laughter-like honeybell”, a quote from Pablo Neruda that inspired her poem.
About Heather
One of the reasons that we did pictures with the mirror was that mirror has a very important meaning for Heather. She told me mirror made her feel safe, because it confirmed her existence in the world. She would look at any mirror of her convenience, and it gave her comfort every time she saw herself.
This is not a story about a girl of vanity, but about a girl who experienced near-death twice and she was constantly anxious about her own existence.
When Heather was younger, she once met an aggressive dog, and it ripped her lower lip off. She remembered there was a lot of blood and pain. She was sent to the hospital but her parents were not informed immediately because she was at the babysitter’s when she was injured, and at that time she felt terribly alone. She was worried that she might pass, and as a young kid she was worried that she would not be able to say goodbye to her family before she passed. Later on, her parents came as soon as they heard the news. Luckily, after about 60 stitches she was stabilized, but this experience traumatized her.
As she grew older, she went to college and started working. She loved biking. There was a day she was riding her bike just like any other day to work, the sun was shining bright, the sky was blue, everything just seemed perfectly normal. All of a sudden, she saw a big truck and noticed that the truck driver was not paying attention to the road, or perhaps she was at a blind spot that the driver could not see her. The next second she was on the ground, heavily hit, by this truck that weighed couple of tons. Even worse, the driver did not notice he hit someone, he kept driving, and Heather was dragged for 10 seconds… 15 seconds… She was desperate and in her most terrified state that I couldn’t begin to imagine, she started screaming as loud as she could to get help. Finally, the truck stopped, and passengers came and helped. Struck by immense pain, she was thinking that might be the last day of her life. She thought, “Why would I die in this fashion, why did it have to be me?”
That night, at the ER, she talked to the reaper and came back. She made it. Again, her parents did not know about the accident immediately on that very night. She felt alone, again, but she also felt guilty, she felt like she should not bother her parents about it. I wonder, how did that feel? I would not know. A mix of deep sadness and loneliness, and a gloss of anxiety and questioning of her self-worth. Am I still real? Do I still exist? What just happened? Why am I still alive? Perhaps she was having a million of questions in her head – I can only guess.
“Live everyday as if it’s your last”, this sounds very melodramatic to people like us, but to Heather, it is very relatable now. She was not sure if she would be able to walk anymore but after a lot of physical therapy, she started walking again. There’s something she would not do anymore - riding a bike. It’s inevitable that she experiences fear and anxiety when she’s crossing the street now, but thankfully she’s healthy and walking, not in a wheelchair or non-existence. She radiates, with her beautiful poems, and her sweet smile. Like she wrote, she has that “orange laughter-like honeybell”.
In the End
Heather told me she still did not understand why these tragic experiences happened to her, she questioned if she was chosen for bad luck. I honestly told her that she definitely had better luck than others, because she was still breathing and able to take in every single bit of beauty of life. Perhaps, she was meant to experience a little bit more to feel more alive and understand life a little deeper.
Life is a myth, but we should enjoy it while we can because we will be dead for a long time.