I left Brooklyn with my (then) boyfriend on Sunday March 15th to stay at his family’s lake house in Canandaigua. The intent was to go away for a week. I packed two sweaters, two pairs of pants, and two books.
My best friend, Elliot, tragically died 3 weeks before. We were not able to hold a memorial because of the coronavirus. Part of fleeing New York was to run from his death. Elliot existed a mile from my apartment in Brooklyn, but not in Canandaigua. It wouldn’t be odd to not see him in this place. Maybe he’d be back on return to Brooklyn?
We left Brooklyn in the early afternoon and arrived in the dark. In the morning I woke up, turned to my boyfriend, and asked, “Where am I?”
Canandaigua is the fourth largest of the Finger Lakes. The Finger Lakes were formed by glaciers, and originally inhabited by Iroquois Tribes, mainly the Seneca and Cayuga Nations. Canandaigua’s name is from the Seneca tribe and means, “The chosen spot.” The lake is 15 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. It does not smell of salt, and has no tides. Canandaigua is about a six hour drive from Brooklyn and an hour south of Lake Ontario. It is 30 minutes south of The Sacred Grove—the spot where God visited Joseph Smith for the first time, the founding event for the Church of Latter-day Saints. It snows in April and May. There is also wine.
I went north to feel safe and hide. But it’s hard to hide when the world is falling apart, your best friend has died, and your business is set on fire. It’s hard to feel safe when the one person you are in isolation with is falling out of love with you and you’re living on a dead end street with a car you cannot drive. (Stick. I tried.)
During the first week of quarantine my boyfriend told me that I was not intuitively a creative person. I started to take these photos because I was trying to impress this man. To prove that I was creative. Maybe then he could love me. So much was breaking, I wanted to fix one thing.
My boyfriend played one song on the piano during quarantine, Paul Simon’s, “Still Crazy After All These Years.” It’s about a man still in love with his ex. A month into quarantine he said to me, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”
At some point, I started making these photos for myself. Of this strange place. In this strange house. I never met his parents, but I lived in their home for nearly 3 months. I know where they keep the paprika. I drank their sweet vermouth. I am still grateful for their dishwasher. In this house I felt my brain deteriorating and simultaneously fighting to make sense of nonsensical circumstances.
Spring is not my favorite season. Early spring looks uncomfortable and awkward. Nature’s puberty. Elliot said cherry blossom trees represented the girls who hit puberty first and get boobs. The envied few who everyone is unnaturally obsessed with. Last spring, all I wanted were cherry blossoms. When we left Brooklyn they were about to bloom. They didn’t bloom upstate till May. When a neighbor’s tree finally blossomed I sat under it and wept by myself on a Sunday. It felt good talking to Elliot.
I made these photos, and really didn’t think much of them. At the start of quarantine I remember hearing calls for creativity, ingenuity, the time to write your novel etc etc. I was in deep grief and experiencing debilitating depression. Touching my camera felt good, but all I could focus on was light and color. Looking at them a year later, I see how hard I was fighting to not slip off a ledge, struggling to be present in this strange place.
The time I spent in Canandaigua is the longest amount of time I’ve been away from New York City since I moved here in the fall of 2008. I came back to Brooklyn in June. I am no longer with this man. I avoided looking at these for months because it was too painful. As we crawl through all these strange anniversaries of the ghost year of 2020, these photos are in my brain. I see love for a man who broke my heart. I think some are beautiful, some are ugly, some are haunting, and I mostly want to give the kid that took them a hug.
When my relationship ended I drove to see my family on Cape Cod. I drove straight to the Ocean. I smelled the salt water and cried. This water I prefer.
Be gentle. Tread lightly in these opening months. There’s much healing to be done.
Also, please, don’t make me go back to Canandaigua.
