My story is one encountered quite often. I was not born special in any way. I didn’t excel in anything as much as I would have liked to. In fact, I do not believe I will ever feel accomplished.
There is always a distance in things – often safe or comfortable. That very distance symbolizes one of the many ways one can recite a poem about life – about losing, finding, and being found; even if it means failing at it. For me, it could be embodied in the acceptance of the phrase: I don’t need you – please stay.
The dog of time
subject to an authority
the dog of time
the animal in motion in deliberation
the dog of time
now chewing up a bone
Razor-sharp teeth biting off chunks of days
and grinding mouthfuls of years
Shattered pieces are crushed
and edges are dissolved
As a tale spikes remembrance into goneness,
I am forgetting
but not letting go.
About Yiota Tsokou
Yiota Tsokou is a Greece-based self-taught photographer. Her interest in photography sparked in 2014, when she started experimenting with analog photography. In 2015 she participated in a workshop on film photography offered by the School of Photography at the Athens Technical College. Since 2017, she has attended a series of classes on visual storytelling as well as the art of photography. Her work has been published in online and printed magazines such as Agitate (October 2015), Photoklassik (September 2016), Adore Noir Magazine (2017), Burn Magazine (2019). Her essay entitled “The Distance” is one she has been working on since 2017. It started as a study on self portraits to soon become a diary documenting her own experience of the human condition, as seen through the eyes of an individual struggling with OCD, depression, and bulimia nervosa. By means of the camera, she is trying to capture inner and outer landscapes of the human psyche, exploring the very idea of identity and the search of personal meaning of life.
