Aurel Manea Photography

You have to understand my friend that the world was never written in black and white. No matter what you do, each action you take will be both good and evil even if you will see it to the end of your life in a positive manner it never will be. It will be just a selfish choice you made because it will be the self that took it. No matter  how innocent it may seem, how normal and how good the intentions behind it. You will do your best and at the end of your life behind you there can lie the shattered earth. And still have a smile on your face. Many times it’s the best of deeds that do the most of evil if you are unable to see past your own walls. And to  be able to do that  is yet another choice you have to make. You can take the easy road and always be right in your own little context and you would have lived and died like an angel.
Or you can take the red pill and your road just got a whole lot harder. And from there only more difficult choices, each one a pain to take, each one shattering lives. And you may keep going your old way but carry the weight of it all on your shoulders until it eats you up. Or you can try and keep a balance between good and evil, compromising where possible and always take a peek on the other side of you before deciding. Or you can just be Zen and do nothing that could possibly harm anyone or anything. Just look and learn.
Well my friend, sometimes it’s best to keep a coin around, like me.

Yours truly
The antagonist

warning: The below image is graphic and might be considered offensive.
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 Dystalgia : noun – The feeling of longing for another time and circumstances that could have happened but didn’t.

Somewhere out there the warmth of your skin upon mine and your intoxicating scent sends ripples across endless oceans of possibility. I can feel the moment from here.

It was dusk. Outside birds were making their noisy debut and dogs barking idiotic barks for no reason. The cars  coming in and out of the parking lot, police sirens in the distance and the elevator’s sound through the building walls filled the room with  sounds.
He woke up . Perhaps, he could not tell, perhaps he was not even asleep but got lost again in a tough and then suddenly lost it. He may not have slept all night.
In his bed and aside him , half naked, there was a young girl. Her sight did not surprise him even tho he could not connect to the hours before. He remembered every detail of the evening and every detail seemed far away in the distance, belonging to somebody else’s life. And in between, nothing, no bridge to connect him.
He looked at her as she slept, at the childish smile on her face, her smooth lines, the sheets wrapped around her fragile body. This also reminded him of the fact that he was to lazy to turn on the heating last night and the room was cold. In fact an excuse to himself,  the heating system made a small noise that bothered him. As any sound did nowadays. Even in complete silence in the middle of the night he could hear a background sound inside his head, small pieces and patterns like an old modem machine.There was no stopping to that, only that pause when he managed to sleep.
He tucked the girl and made sure she was not cold.
But in reality even while looking at her and observing, he was actually looking beyond , towards nothing, towards a big  void that occupied the same position in space as the one her details had.
What did she see in him, how did they end up like that ? Why now, why when it was all rendered valueless, why not before, why at all and why this way  ? The timing everything happened in his life seemed almost funny if he toughed about it for a little. But he didn’t too much anymore.
The girl gave a slight sigh beyond the point of recognition and took  his left arm around her chest and neck. Her face lay a more visible smile. He looked some more at her and could only see her sins and in her sins he saw his own. If there was a feeling left inside it was guilt. Without logic, without meaning, the one thing worse than any pain , pure guilt.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to feel something that he couldn’t. Anything. He wanted the pain that made his life miserable for years, he wanted to feel the warmth that lay aside him and give it back. He concentrated on his tear glands, perhaps if he could make the tears come out physically the feeling will follow. He struggled to smile as she just smiled and realized he almost forgot how to control the muscles for that. His hand was still around her and with that tried imagining someone else in her place, the one person that in the end would have made sense. With no reference that thought also slipped away very fast.

The noise was getting louder and louder, the sounds, the images, the walls of the room and the girl , reality itself became just that. Meaningless, vague, mechanical.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, a thing he knew he couldn’t at this point.
A possibility arose again  in his head , a scenario  that seemed more natural than anything else. In fact his eyes caught a spark for a few seconds. And the scenario unfolded…

He gets up very quietly not to disturb her, slowly removing his arm from her chest. He puts on whatever cloches finds around. Leaves the phone on the bed table, 2 hours now before the 8:30 scheduled ring time. As he stands by the door he turns around and whispers something loud enough to know he said it but silent enough not to be heard :
– I have to get out a little… bye.
The girl whispers something in her sleep as if she heard him, something that doesn’t mean anything except by the way she says it. It had a beautiful feel to it, a sound soft and gentle in the sea of noise.
The door closes silently behind him.
Soon the sun rose and with its first ray,  for a short time there was silence. The world stood still.

“Hey, long time no see. I hear you’re into photos now, I meet up with your brother a couple of days ago, told me all about it”

Sometimes I meet people on the street.  Strangers. They come to me with a friendly look and ask me how I’ve been, what’s up.
Ipretend to know them. I know I should and there is a bit of familiarity to them, but I cannot place it in time and space. I go along for a while.  I ask them how they are, what life brought to them  and hoping this way they might say something to make me remember.
They are neighbors from where I grew up, school or high school colleagues , long time friends, kids with whom I spent a whole childhood. All of them obliterated out of memory and out of existence.
My look betrays me anyway, I give up and ask them details. Sometimes lost pieces of memory come together to form an image that maybe is real but cold and unfamiliar, like a movie I saw a long time ago that got stuck yet a movie that never meant anything to me . But most of the times everything gets mixed up and the faces end up on other persons in muffled images that have no coherence and cannot be related to anything at all. And why should they, there’s no longer a timeline, there is no main story to relate them to, it was the first to go when the road collapsed behind and around. Life is but a short moment cough between two unknowns and the unwritten future in all it’s possible combinations more clear and vivid than the lost past.
Nostalgia is dead, the mind struggles in vain .
I offend by not remembering .I  should feel sorry for that. But I don’t, I do not know who they are . I excuse myself, I gieve a short explanation  of how and why and walk away with the promise of maybe a beer sometimes soon.
But I forget about that anyway.

Darklands

This is me. I weigh 80 kg, I’m 1.82 meters tall, 28 years old yet only alive for 4. I have birthmarks on my right hand and a scar on my face from when a dog bit me long time ago. For one year I have been wearing long unattended hair and before that short shaved. People who don’t really know me would label me as introverted depressed person with weird habits . Those who do  would say I am somehow bipolar, jumping from a state of complete and utter depression to one  over-extroverted. I usually don’t get out of my boring daily routine but when I do, I do it all the way. When something new comes along my path I take my chance with it. I am usually very open minded about anything and like to put people in situation where I challenge their predefined patterns of thinking about taboo subjects. I like to argue . I like drugs and never say no to them .They played a crucial part in my life with the new perspectives and viewpoints they brought. I like music. I like the girl I love, and I know in my heart that there is a high chance when she will be gone forever beyond hope I will die. I spend my nights thinking about that and about perspectives but find none. I like and do a lot of things, I make enough money and one without knowing would otherwise say I have nothing to complain about. They would be wrong.

I like to photograph, I carry all the time with me a medium backpack that contains my camera ,3 lenses, an external hard drive, a cleaning kit, a green laser pointer, a high precision scale, a portable microscope, an extra card and battery, condoms, a cable and a pen. The backpack is custom adapted so it fits my own needs , the padding removed and made so that it is thin and I have the fastest access to the camera without taking off the backpack. Estimated time-to-photo  : 4 seconds. If I see something I want to make sure I capture it. I do my best to facilitate travel, I have everything organized, I know how I’m going to carry all items in the plane and be as lite as possible.I spend a lot of time organizing everything in perfect order. There was a time when I was always in some place, on a volcano, around some glacial lake or in some European city with a camera . I enjoyed the strange and new feelings that each place made me live, the beauty of the new. And for that time it replaced the other feelings, the ones of desperation, it managed to fill the void .
I tough I was going to spend the rest of my life traveling and photographing. I loved each place, each new experience, each  breath of new air alike.

Not anymore.