Project One: Collision

DMMA Productions is back! And our first project is that a short story will be written every month by me, which will be accompanied by a series of photos (taken by James) which reflect a theme within that. We like to think of it as taking a traditional form of storytelling to another level; like a picture book where art and fiction lock horns.

PROJECT ONE: COLLISION

STORY

I wouldn’t call it love. I don’t know what it was – trauma. Traumatic. Like brain damage. I don’t know if I believe in God, or Fate, or The Matrix, but I knew that I was walking away from something because God – or Fate, or The Matrix – was jabbing me in the gut. And I couldn’t believe walking away was that easy. My heart felt as if it had been sprinting, and with every step it was slowing down to a pedestrian throb. Throb. Throb.

Throb.

So I ran for my life.

It all happens in slow motion.

It’s eight o’clock. It must be because I’m nearly at the station; then it’s fifteen minutes to Southwark, and walking from there I’ll be dead on time for my eight thirty start. It must be eight o’clock, because this is the way every day goes. Yes, my mornings are meditative. It’s necessary to relax into my disdain before turning into a headless chicken for Mrs lazybullybossonedayI’llthrowmyresignationinyourfatface at the strike of eight thirty. Thousands of commuters rush past me, but I’m an ocean.

God I love yoga. 

But today: June 15^th, eight o’clock – the ocean parts.  It washes over each and every schoolgirl, and stockbroker, and paves a way for him. Someone that has never belonged to eight am’s familiar sea of faces, he stands out.

I was weaving in and out the swarm. Like bacteria they just seemed to multiply and push me back into the forward march of the throng.  

It was an ordinary moment, like the embarrassing moment on the tube when you lock eyes with a stranger. Like that, we should have looked away instantly, but she didn’t.

She didn’t blink.

The lights changed, then again, but she stood frozen in the island in the middle of the road. Then I felt those bright eyes look into me. An invisible hand reached out, through the thin film of my skin and fiddled with my liver, tugged my intestines, squeezed my heart. With that one look she knew me. I felt…attacked.

And I felt her then, as I battled to the frontline and saw her still standing there, her back to me now of course since I’d passed her.

He’s beautiful. He’s the most delicate creature I’ve ever seen. His eyes are tears. And his body, the tear drop: he carries his height with a slouch, and his skin is pale. He’s androgynously fragile looking. I want to break him.

I don’t walk on because I can’t lose that magnetic feeling. He can reject me, he can love me, but this man has to know he’s...I don’t know what. I turn around and

BLUE. Blue eyes.

The little man turns red – “NO WAIT IT’S RED!”

I run to him, charged by an unknown force and –

I wouldn’t call it love. I don’t know what love is. That moment was the crossing of two lines, then erasing them with the rubber end of a pencil because a mistake was made: we hesitated. The car didn’t.

ILLUSTRATIONS

This sequence of photos should be considered in relation to Veronica Aloess' short story Collision, as if they were illustrations. They illustrate the sense of physical collision felt by two people in what seems like a fateful moment, and mocks the concept of love at first sight.

Credits-
Creative Directors: James Gribble and Veronica Aloess
Photographer/Editor: James Gribble
Models: Toni Jean Erasmus and Joseph John Scatley