The Egg That Doesnt Open

Xay One Easter Special

Balance

You stop thinking about the heels after a while. That's the thing nobody believes when I say it, but it's true, at some point, the angle stops being something you manage and becomes simply the angle, the only angle, the one your body has decided is normal. What doesn't disappear is the concrete. Concrete is honest in a way that carpet and grass are not. It tells you immediately, through the heel, through the sole, through the whole architecture of your leg, exactly where your weight is and whether that's a good idea. On Easter Sunday, on steps built for transit, not for sitting, I was having a very precise, ongoing conversation with a surface that had no interest in being kind about it.

The latex was warm already. It gets warm quickly when the sun finds it, and once it's warm, it stays warm, and you carry that warmth with you as a kind of second skin that is also, quietly, a kind of pressure. Not unpleasant. Just present. Always present. I find that I think more clearly inside it than outside it, which is something I couldn't have told you before I started doing this. There is less noise. Less of the ordinary ambient self-consciousness that comes with being a body in a space among other bodies. The hood closes that off entirely. I can't see who's watching. I can't hear what they're saying. I can't form a response to any of it. What's left is balance; the physical kind, yes, wrists behind my back and weight distributed across heels that offer very little surface area for the job, but also something else, something harder to name, which is the balance between being completely exposed and completely private at the same time.

I tiptoe through shoots like this. Not metaphorically. Literally, always, in these shoes, across whatever surface appears. Each step a small calculation. Each pause is a held result.

Isolated

The rope goes on, and something shifts. It's not fear, and it's not discomfort exactly; it's more like a door closing, gently, on a room you were already in. The hands go still because they have been told to, and after a few minutes, the stillness stops feeling like a restriction and becomes a fact. My hands are here. They are not available. That is simply how it is right now. The mind, freed from the possibility of reaching for anything, goes somewhere else entirely.

Deaf is interesting. Blind is interesting. Gagged is the one that surprises people most when I describe it, because they assume the silence would feel like a loss, like something taken. But from inside, it feels more like a gift you didn't ask for, the removal of the obligation to respond, to react, to shape your expression into something readable and reassuring for whoever is looking. I can struggle, and nobody sees it on my face because my face isn't available either. What they see is the surface. The surface is calm. Underneath the surface, I am working, with my balance, with my breath, with the rope, with the heat, with the heels, with the concrete, with the giant bear sitting next to me, who is not working at all and somehow finds this very easy, but none of that labor travels outward. It stays mine.

That isolation is where the shoot actually happens, for me. Not in front of the camera but behind the hood, in the sealed and shining dark where there is nothing to do except be exactly this, here, now, on these steps, in this skin that is not my skin and is also completely my skin. Easter seemed right for it, though I couldn't have explained why before we started. Afterward, I understood: It's about what you can't see into, and whether you trust that something is there anyway.