This is a little project I collaborated with Emily Wang, who's been my photographer since 2020. I had been reading Garden of Eden by Hemingway the summer of 2022, in NYC, and thought that summer was best for reading novels: the days are longer, more time to mull over a book. I had this narrative in my head, where in the summer I imagined a woman, but I didn’t know what she looked like. So I asked Emily, my long-time photographer, because she'd know how to visualize what goes on in my head. Therefore, we had a photographer, behind her lens, capturing me and the woman I imagined. I realized that, published posthumously, GoE might contain Hemingway's reluctant truths. After all, he wrote,

"There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make." 

Seemed like he was losing memories.
What I also once again saw was that writing was like cutting an onion. The writer must peel themself layer after layer, but only ending up infecting (affecting) themself. A perfect circle must be broken to become (a) more interesting shape(s). There's nothing I can do but write.

Thank you Em, for looking at my face for so long and still knowing me. I only wanted to see how you see as well.

Photographer: Emily Wang
Inspiration: Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway

Garden of Eden: Summer 2022

Lately I've been sleeping a lot. My friends used to know
where to find me because I never slept. But
lately no one knows where to find me. The more I sleep
the less I time I have alive. It's like that I've been
slipping into another world.
I had a dream the other day. I asked a lover for his
hand. He said that he could give it to me, so I handed
him a knife. He sat on the edge of his bed and chopped
his left hand off. However, when he handed it to me, I
suddenly didn't want it anymore. The hand had become
a blob of meat, deflating in the palm of my hand. I
looked at him, and didn't know what to say. But he
looked like he was about to faint.

I've been losing memory. Forgetting what has
happened the night before, who I've met. The more I
sleep, the more I forget. Each time I wake up, it feels
like someone has just punched my brain, like
overcoming a jet lag, and it goes on for a few more
hours. Sleep has become my enemy. It seems that I've
left my memory somewhere else, at another place, and
I'm waking up into someone else's body in an
unfamiliar apartment where I've forgotten where the
water is or how to turn the shower on. However, I know
that someone has been writing my stories.

During August, a woman arose from my body one
night. She looked at me from mid air and slowly bent
over me. She then came on top of me, her long hair
brushing against my neck, and I could feel her hair wet,
like she'd just come out of the shower. She told me to
quiet. "You won't be waking up in a long time." Before I
drifted off into sleep again, I saw her face clear: she
looked exactly like me. When I woke up two days later, I saw a half smoked cigarette left in my ash tray, with
dark red lipstick stain on it. It wasn't mine. I realized
that I might have been exchanging bodies with her.