ranya-johnston

[ranya-johnston]

Leaving the Door Open

I live with an old dog. At night she wanders with her senses confused about whether it’s night or day, why walls have suddenly become inconvenient, and if she’s outside or behind closed doors.

So in the early morning hours when I hear her slow click-clack paces, I peel my frame upright into a state of half sleep and open the front door so she can wander in and out as she pleases into the night air and courtyard outside. We live in a small basement flat, small enough that my bedroom is a box by its entrance. A fortuitous floorplan that has eased this nightly compromise two long-time companions have arrived at.

My sleep hasn’t always been this easy. On a Halloween night a few years ago, in a different bedroom on the other side of town, I woke up to a masked man standing over me, his interrogating muffled voice agitated and frantic. I had no idea what was going to happen next. My senses stalled while attempting to jostle into the reality of the current situation, and my mind tried desperately to convince my own self that “No, this isn’t a dream or a ghost”. But I was mute, 

Meanwhile, my dog’s head was propped comfortably on my duvet-ed legs. She had been monitoring me but up to this point had seen no signs of distress. In my shrinked state, she had detected no indicators that there was cause for alarm. But as I came to and my voice finally connected with my nervous system, I hurtled a full-throttled “GEETTT OUT!” and she immediately synced into alpha attack mode. The scene ended with me holding firm her strained collar, and the masked intruder running out into the streets that were still littered with costumed stragglers from the evening’s frightful festivities. 

The night didn’t end there. It lingered for a year or two, maybe more, all my senses constantly questioning things around me. I began to forget when I was awake or asleep, and what it was like to truly rest. I got better just as my dog had a stroke and got diagnosed with dementia. 

Now on those nights that I stir after leaving the front door open, I can wake up to the sound of dark-night rain disguising itself at first as her paws coming back over the threshold, and I am reminded just how much I have been unlaced from any panic. That my nights don't have to follow the same step as her increasingly tilted circadian rhythms. And the soft coming-to realisation that my friend is making her slow faded exit. We both know she no longer has to be on my watch.

[ranya-johnston]

Strangers

“I know all the pubs round here,” he said squinting at me, still slightly sleepy.

We had spotted each other a few times walking our respective dogs on early park mornings, nodding recognition though distanced strangers. But on this particular Spring morning, the gears had shifted. On 12 April 2021, Covid restrictions had been eased, and outdoor hospitality was reopening after being shuttered for over a year.

“You can take my number so we can go for a drink sometime.”

“What are you doing later?” he smiled, and by lunchtime, we were ordering our first bottle of wine at our local, their doors flung open for our arrival and long-deprived custom.

That sunny afternoon we binged each other’s company force-feeding uncanny similarities in between gulping bursts of stylized laughter. Neither of us was in the mind to admit that the only thing we really had in common at this early stage was that we were both very much out of practice. So we ordered yet another bottle of wine for our cause, one to help coordinate a joint sense of unflinching and unshackled abandon.

“How did you decide what to get?” he asked after doing an audit of our tattoos. I’d been accumulating my various inky scratches steadily and haphazardly for over twenty years, while he admitted he had only just started collecting his body art recently in a surge after his divorce.  

“Don’t overthink it” I advised, “in the grand scheme of things, everything’s temporary, even a pandemic.”

“Let’s go get tattoos right now!” he said pouncing on the prospect, “let’s do it!”  his curly hair coiling with tightening urgency, trying to contort insatiability into spontaneity.

A few weeks later, I was sitting on the floor leaning against his legs. Surrounded by his friends on various couches, he was sitting comfortably with his hand on my shoulder. It was late, we’d all had a lot to drink but having so much fun, finally.

“... no, you tell them the story, you tell it so much better than I do,”  he said with a showman’s lilt

“Yeah, but you really love telling it” I replied with double-act timing, smiling up at him fondly, boosted by his wanting to share our fairytale of functioning hedonism so publicly. It gave it testimony.

Opening with our tattoo-on-the-first-date beginnings, I listened as he took his audience through our intoxicating tale like a pied piper, recounting our sweet-hearting days with playful numbering.

Pulling me close, with the listeners still invested, he said in a loud whisper “It’s because we’re friends, that’s why we work,” And for those very few freedom-filled weeks, before I decided to cut back on my drinking, and before he decided to just stop calling, I believed him.

(music plays*)

Isn't it strange, How people can change From strangers to friends, Friends into lovers And strangers again?

I agree. It is strange, and perhaps the Spring of 2021 was the strangest of them all.

*Strange by Celeste

[ranya-johnston]

Selfie

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 I love this photograph, a postcard version has lived with me for years on my desk pinboard. A young woman in 1950s America, her white lapels towering up to her face like the skyscrapers that are loading the frame around her, urging on her ambition while holding onto her trepidation.

With the looming, image-making dramatic tools so prevalent, prying eyes out from window after window, her own knowing she is being watched while being watchful, you can’t help but consider if this is in fact a still from a Kubrick-esque film? Actually, wait, aren’t we sure this IS from that Kubrick film…? Haven’t we seen this Untitled Film Still #21 city girl on screen, on her first day in the post-war corporate world? Don’t we know what happens to her? To this type of girl? Don’t we all know what happens to #21?  

And the luscious librarian (#13), the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the ingenue setting out on life's journey (#48), and the tough but vulnerable film noir idol (#54)? We remember seeing them too right?

Who is she again?

This is the artist Cindy Sherman

Sherman has staged a long career rotating the camera round to capture herself as other characters. In this career breakout Untitled Film Still series, she plays a fictitious young female actress playing a slew of fictional female roles. Seventy to be precise, captured over three years. That’s seven-zero different, yet so familiar and recognizable, female characters - an inexhaustible and insatiable female roster to cast from when playing up for the cameras.

In 2021, it came to light that researchers at Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, had found that “Sharing or viewing filtered selfies in stories made people feel worse,” and that “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

But over forty years ago, before pocket-living phones were a one-stop portable camera, self-promotion and mass transmission device, Sherman was already investigating, with care and informed handling, how the sense of self elasticates with both a growing power-yielding tension and threatening snap slap back when women turn the camera on themselves.

I went to a party last week, coincidently at the MoMA in New York which has the original Untitled Film Still #21 as part of its permanent collection. Lots of people and personalities were there in their sartorial costumed finery having their photo taken or taking it themselves. I even took a selfie or two with my alter ego who was in residence for the evening.

But if I’m honest with myself, I have never taken a selfie that isn’t bolted with a visiting feigned confidence and a needy please-like one-two punch. I’m sure I’ll never take one that isn’t of this combination and I’m now convinced that I’m happier off in myself watching the pros like Sherman at work. All seventy of them.

[ranya-johnston]

The Bridge

September was inching in with longer shadows and shorter hours as humbled leaves fell from slow revealing branches. We were walking over a footbridge in a London park, both looking ahead, striding side by side.

We preferred to walk rather than sit opposite each other. It was in keeping with lives lived as a father and daughter estranged.

You turn to me and pause. My eyes start to water. Time is shifting your face, blending all your ages that I have in my collection, from young man to old, they’re now all present in front of me in a hazed fragile fractal. You have passed, and time has pressed on. Suspended. On this bridge. In a London park. I reel through the moment frame by frame when I go to retrieve our last walk, but the playback easily spins off its linear track or blurs at the edges. Nestled in the back. Squinting to call back in the fragments.

But recollections are at the mercy of memory’s prerogative to surface make believe of our own making. Will today’s archive footage of that day be gentle with a kind resolution? Or will it be wincing with foreboding and regretful hindsight?

It’s September again. I’m walking somewhere in the evening hours not realising at first my route will take me past the shut gates of the park’s entrance. Fast paced buses, cars, scooters, taxis are a distracting torrent, but I stop.

It’s not worth the rush.

Looking through the wrought iron railings into the sleeping trees, their dense inky bark and blue leafy shrouds are a dimly lit portal compared to the pulsing city glare behind me.

I can just about see the beginnings of the park’s various paths. Your permanent absence has settled in and brought about a new tender sense of being relatedness. It means I can stand here a little while longer. Tucked in between the night and bright lights.