BALANCE

Words by Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Allen Thorfinn

Within the battle of black and white, no one answers. We are waging a war within ourselves, yearning for the homeostasis that keeps our world from turning upside down. The balance, that is what we all seek. How we attain it is ultimately at our own control. We will suffer until our center has been realized and brought forth into our present eyes, the structure we build for security, for strength, it is not established without the pain and suffering that is life. Without this, we cannot know the divine beauty in simple things. Take pride in even our smallest of achievements.

Stepping back through time, I revisit the ghosts, the endless death that surrounded me. Trying to make sense out of things that only bred confusion. Seeking balance while kneeling next to dead bodies and graves of lovers, friends, family, all who passed too soon. Even amidst the atrocity I fell back into daydreams then regained consciousness, focusing on the blades of grass and flowers pushing up where once a beautiful spirit blessed me but is now rotting and seeking out their next life.

Shannon died in my arms, my love, my best friend. We were miles away from anyone. Tucked into the woods by the river. I had gone into the forest to explore and when I returned he was nearly lifeless. Arm tied off with his belt, needle still in his arm. I held him and screamed until my voice escaped me. Leaving his body and walking 4 miles back into town to call for help felt like eternity weighing upon me like making it from dusk till dawn. I hid my distress. I swallowed and swallowed until I slowly dissolved into a world blacker than before.

Balance. Where does it lie in this world? The constant struggle encapsulates me into a place where I question if I’m sinking or swimming. I keep watching death strike everyone but me, and I want to go down. I’ve tried so many times yet something keeps me mortal. Dwelling in the shadows trying to find something, anything that will breathe life into this desolate state. The reaper and I are having a stand off. He walks away and no matter how fast I run, I can’t keep up.

Since I was 13, I’ve lost over 30 people close to me, the number rising every year. I grow tired of burying people and continuing to walk the earth. Three this past year, it doesn’t end, and I sit here staring at bottles of pills wondering what it’s like to fade out of this life. Something keeps me here. Damn karma. I know that if I leave this life by my own hand I’ll suffer more the next time. I keep working on this fragile creature coated in steel, the creature that wants to love but fears the entire world; my body slowly disintegrating while I hold the scales.

So many times it’s simply fight or flight, and occasionally I do both. Depending on the tip of the iceberg, I’m slipping or swimming, body going deeper under the foggy indigo water, watching all the light fade as my body starts floating upward, a pale blue grey on a quest for a homeostasis no matter how fucked up the balance. My heart is solid ice, breaking like my bones against a distant shore I can only see in my mind. Peaks of solid mass up against my frame, my third eye casting a glow no one else can see. I’m drifting with an unforeseen current and ready to crash in isolation because this is where I have placed myself.

People die every day but not me. It’s a release that seems like it’ll be the greatest dissipater of pain but that’s the biggest fucking lie. I’ve gone under and began the journey then been called back. Not fully here, not fully dead, eclipsed from the world of the living like a zombie searching for corpses and lacking most desires; a grim existence the perpetuates the longing, the life out of balance, the memories of what were and the dreams of what could be, letting the present moment elude me like the darkening of the moon.

By the bodies of my dead friends, I both grapple the earth and attempt to clutch the stars; the creation of witness of undying war. Like a demon in the shadow waiting to feed, I crawl in the mist at dawn, digging at the grass with tears streaming across my flesh. Through my thick black eyeliner, they paint my body in streaks like lightning. Face down, staring into the earth, I collapse, one hand open, the other one clenched upon a tombstone, my voice nothing but a memory fading like the light in the clouds drifting overhead.

Lara Noel is a nihilistic mistress of darkness with a thirst to unfold the inner workings of her mind. Born and raised by music and mythical creatures, her feral spirit endures unremittingly. A self-described beautiful mess and co-conspirator of waking the fuck up, she currently resides in Eugene, Oregon with 2 small dogs and 7 mind-blowing cats.

Patrik Alex Thorfinn is a sharpie artist and the guitarist/vocalist for Westminster, South Carolina death metallers Coffin Torture.

Ten Years

By Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

Ten years gone, Ten years of slowly losing myself to the point that I forgot who I was. Ten years and 2 more babies; babies I had to keep safe and put on a happy face for when all I wanted to do was tear my flesh apart, drowning in a pool of tears in my blood, looking to the sky and asking why, begging for something, anything to end the chaos.

Day after day, year after year, picking up the pieces, pushing myself, raising children despite the hole in my head and heart, wondering if we’d all be better off dead. The loneliness and madness ate at me to the point I felt like my core had been dissolved, exposed nerves being trampled on.

How was I supposed to conquer my own issues when safety was questionable all the time? So much uncertainty; I was a mess. He was a mess, yet I was the glue trying to mend everything. One person can only take so much. I had been losing myself gradually without realizing it. Once that separation came, the flood crashed over and into me, awakening parts of myself that had been tucked away in a chamber silencing every part of myself.

From birth, I struggled to find my way. By age 10, I had moved over ten times, in the custody of my grandmother, exposed to the angel of death, uprooted, replanted, all to just repeat what chipped away at me over and over again. The anger was building, setting me on fire. All I craved was escape, distraction and destruction. The pain that met the anger was creating the perfect storm inside me.

Tired of being exploited, dragged around like a puppet, being held responsible for things I never should have. All these things were forced deep inside and I was tired of it all. Insanity built. I detracted from my past and acted spontaneously, just wanting to feel something, anything. It was a pattern of unleashing the demons that were choking me then wanting more then to fall back into an alternate universe where I could see the fires burning and laugh yet not feel the heat.

Entombed in dark water, fixated on the darkness, I created an existence where I felt in control but I didn’t realize was that I was entering into a state where I was becoming completely out of control. The rage increased. As I sat by watching my mother make one bad choice after another and my father still looming, making every attempt to re-enter our world, I was picking up cigarette butts and learning to smoke while raiding the liquor cabinets of anyone’s house I was at.

With my parent’s chaos and unpredictability, they had created a monster. My father stalking us, my mother caving in, thinking some visit time was good when all he wanted was to use me as an object when my mother was being “tough” and not allowing him to be close to her. Her insistence on him taking me for a bike ride and acting like a father ended in being brought into the bushes down the street and made to serve him when all I wanted was to laugh and feel something I saw on other kid’s faces.

Walking to bus stop then having this awful burning in the pit of stomach, knowing something was wrong, I abandoned my friends as the bus pulled up and ran towards my apartment. I could hear my mother screaming. All the doors were locked. I peered through the small slits in the blinds and could see my father attempting to rape her, pinning her down, some shiny object glinting. I banged at the back door until the glass broke shattering all over me. He came to the door holding a butcher knife, ranting. The world felt muffled. Sound and vision obscured by building adrenaline.

I rang doorbells until someone finally opened their home to me. My friend’s parents brought me inside; it felt like eternity before I stopped shaking and blurted out call 911, my mother is being attacked. My father was being handcuffed over a cop car as I was brought back home. His face looked like the evil I envisioned in my head each night before sleeping, those eyes of his, piercing and brutal. He was spitting towards me, calling me a whore and so many other things I began to block out.

Released from jail. He made his way to my school. I was in gym class when our principal came in with a fearful look and said we couldn’t leave for a while because something was being fixed and we had to stay there until being allowed to leave and go back to class. I saw her talking to the gym teacher, the teacher clutching her mouth, coming back to us and shakily speaking, trying to re-establish an activity. It wasn’t until years later that I knew the truth. My father had shown up in full camo gear with a sawed off shotgun threatening to kill me.

We moved again. Within this next ten years, I unraveled completely. School meant nothing to me. It hadn’t ever really meant anything to me. How do you focus on school when your thoughts are whether or not your father is breaking into your house, your expansive thoughts are drifting you in a million directions. I was daydreaming another life and having thoughts that no one else would understand. My questions perplexed the teachers. I was an outcast.

My mother went back to school, still an undiagnosed manic-depressive. Men and shopping sprees kept me overlooked, as did her depression. She loved me but my anger had reached its peak and we became enemies. All I wanted was to be away from everything I knew. My house was not a home. Everything felt foreign and the walls caved in on me. Hanging out with people way older than me, partying and acting reckless was a release. I’d leave for days, weeks at a time. Sometimes she noticed. I felt like a burden to everyone and everything, never fitting in anywhere. Drugs and destruction kept me in a cocoon where my secrets didn’t matter. But it kept me at the base of all these mountains. The mountains I wanted to climb, yet I just fell back staring up, too tired to climb.

Suicide attempts added up like the tears I shed, my body a wasteland of self-destruction. Arrested, probation, lock down. The monster was being strapped down and force-fed a cocktail of pills and repent demanded of me, no one understanding where all this rising of demonic power had come from. It was I now. I was labeled. I was the problem. I was a specimen, a guinea pig to doctors convincing the world they had an answer for problem children. If only they wanted to know my past ten years. If only they saw me. I just wanted to be seen and no one was listening. Groups were a joke. It was all a joke. School began in this detention center. I refused to engage until the teacher sat me with and got real. He simply asked what was important to me. The rage was there, blocking my response. But he sat. I finally mumbled out, “music.” He left and came back 5 minutes later with a book about Muddy Waters. He told me to read it and write a report. For the first time I didn’t want to throw myself against a wall.

My ten years dragged on. In an out of these places aimed to help but just dragged me further from myself, homeschooled because I was deemed a menace to society. The school gladly paying for tutors so I wouldn’t taint the other kids attempting to gain an education. Cast out and largely forgotten. More moves. More attempts to fit in but my world was broken. Everyone looked and felt like poison full of lies. I disappeared into long, lost travels; drug addiction, going so far and I had no idea how to ever get back; those mountains forever growing taller and me feeling an inability to navigate.

Amongst the red rocks, the Pacific Ocean cleansing my skin, working my way back to the land where I was born, ten years brought back a savage compelled to enact peace instead of acts of war. The decade moved on. Coming home to buried friends, everything changed. Wasting more time with someone else with empty promises, bearing two children with who would become my absolute enemy. My identity I tried so hard to keep solid was worn away. I despised the human race while putting on a face and hat that didn’t suit me, hiding everything behind these eyes.

The battle of the wildling inside me coming up against motherhood while watching my partner go down in flames and repeat constant acts of treason upon my flesh and soul. Leaving with six bags in secret fearing death and not knowing what the next minute would bring, I held my children like a goddess ready to board a ship, the sun setting, knowing my feet were taking me through the valleys between these mountains.

Despite the next decade of chaos with moments of divinity, I found my way, up and down, crawling, walking, climbing, standing still to observe what was all-round and above me. Failed marriage, going through college only to land a job that nearly killed me. I continued to pursue the only thing I knew anything about, myself. Ten more years gone by and I reclaim all the space taken up by the pain, the anger, the anguish, the massacre I unleashed upon myself. Exposing myself in a way I never have. Starting to remember who I am and put the pieces back in place, reconnecting the decades that feel like other lives. My hands aren’t bound. My mind is free. I recognize myself. Belonging to no one but what lives inside this head. Staring across this landscape of hardship where I’ve fallen and began the climb back up.

Night Bird

By Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

He bred sickness leaving a trail of tears behind a face that was often a disguise, the inability to search himself devastated the world in which he dwelt and those who were a part of it. So wise in many ways but that world keeps crashing down around you. Sooner or later the debts will need to be paid. Ancient gifts were bestowed, yet choosing to dishonor it leaves emptiness that paralyzes any attempt to change placement.

You have failed yourself more than anyone you’ve touched. You unleashed your mind, then turned away from your heart and those who held you within theirs.

Hollow.

That’s all you’ll be until you honor yourself and reach further than you ever thought possible. The night bird flew high above your wolf, traveling at the same speed, a messenger that met disillusion and a soul blocking out the rising sun.

Your brief moments of clarity when you’d unwind the covers before dusk and put forth energy were not enough. I welcomed into every facet of my being, listening endlessly, sharing…Holding you, letting your tears dissolve into my clothing and coating my flesh, I bared everything. In return I got a fucking junkie who couldn’t give up the mask and find even the smallest remnant of resolve within him that would take hold. The night bird stared deep into me through the deepening darkness.

Life is pain where we are broken down to know the implicit beauty of the curves of a flower’s petals, the breeze that swarms at the right time, instilling the energy of every life form it swept past until greeting our bones. We don’t know our own power until experiencing loss. Appreciating even the simplest of things comes after knowing struggle and losing sight. I began to awake to the call of this messenger; it flooded my mind before waking, stuck within a view my mind has created where I am traveling upstream with a glow forming around me lifting up my head.

I saw happiness trapped inside a prison you created inside your head. My Raven disengaged from your wolf that was losing speed. Someday, you might see yourself the way I did. Someday, you might let your branches extend towards the sky instead of becoming brittle limbs that waste away to the ground under the slightest storm, falling backwards when all I wanted was to see you take flight. With this loss, I sent away my bird with a message while staring into this purple ring, hoping my words might reach you. It began to feel that this energy was never received. Alone, I began to dig deeper, putting away everything that defined what we held and exchanged.

Out of the black woods and into a valley, I let the rain cleanse me, asking to be relieved of the hanging on, the pain that flooded me, shutting down every part of myself, lifeless on my bed with tears that would not cease their cascade. I begged to be freed of eating the dust still settling after the war that raged. Still sweeping shards of broken blue glass and making piles of the remnants left behind, my heart was stinging. Release from this, from all the beginnings and endings that devoured me, I needed an exit.

My feet brushed upon the earth. I stood; firmly planting my feet into the ground asking myself what is was that I truly needed now. My black winged bird crossed the sky, and in that moment it was clear that I was to delve further into my mind, the heart that bled out yet continued to beat, finally putting aside the need to care for others to the point I failed to nourish myself.

The journey of an inward gaze led me to shores where I found inner strength that built and expanded through my core. My words flowed, my mind expanded, and in the distance an owl was taking a night journey toward my realm. As I twirled amongst the memories of my chaotic past, the dark pages that lined my core, I felt a change in the wind, and there in the glow of moon was a grand creature hovering above my body, back and forth, making it’s presence known.

I threw away selfishness and rage. I cast out the doubts and embraced the wings that drew up and down in majestic stride, a figure I could not ignore. Asleep, no longer under fire, a ship cradled my desolate land and brought a treasure that cast out the feeling of ever being alone. A creature often misunderstood, I was being unfurled and taken deep inside where everything that travels through this expansive mind was accepted and seen, felt in a way that I hungered for since birth.

The raven parted from the wolf, and in its place made room for the winds of change and honored a new night bird that led this other being through his dreams and fed his soul. This majestic creature tugged at him since his first dream, the messenger for a soul that needed nudges to be in pursuit of his own passions, much like me. The timing is nothing short of synchronistic, precisely as it was meant to be. The tide changed and with it I was swept closer to understanding myself and ready to bare the inner workings of my mind in a way I never had, demons still attempting to tear me apart, but their clinging slowly dissipating.

Staring naked into the rain, the storm forever raging, pushing it all away and starting my climb back up the mountain while chanting to these elements and birds keeping watch, the grand dissolve of self hatred and doubt had begun. He held onto these eyes and was ready to thrust all he had into transformation fueled by twin flames intertwining after a long separation; the messenger, once again appearing, the sign that a great awakening was taking place. Our night birds are tracing the skies above us while feeding our souls. The new chapter being unveiled, separately yet together, staring deeper with longer gazes, we are compelled to gain strength.

This delicate creature with the weight of the universe inside of him, the ability to crush but wanting more to unleash love, has taken residence where once there was only desolation; an emptiness and state of being misunderstood that tore away at his resolution inside, despite knowing his gifts and abilities. His owl speaking to him over and over but none of it making sense until an unlikely spirit appeared before him. The night bird staring deep inside, his final acceptance that yes, there is another expansive mind that does not fear putting herself out into the universe, does not fear death nor the recesses of her mind where horror strikes just as heavy as waves tearing away at stone cliffs.

In closer union, it all begins to swirl like the marbling upon fresh made paper. We call to each other in the night, the day, in a way that can’t be put into words. It is a rebirth. It is being found. It is the listening to this wise messenger that has brought him and I to this placement, yet we are worlds away. The owl is speaking but he can’t always translate what it is trying to say. The failure to heed the messenger is the same as closing off parts of yourself. I don’t see him suffering similar fates as the man I once loved who now lives in my head as if it were only a dream.

He feels the need to leap, to take flight, and yet remain grounded by the only world he has ever known. Similar challenges lie within him: the need to see himself as others do, to love himself as much as he wants another to love him. To embrace this messenger and keep speed with it, letting it guide him, being in tune with this creature, leading to a path of knowledge where nothing feels alien anymore, not it, not him, or the world that he creates each second.

The owl calls to me as night draws near and wakes me as the stars begin leaving the sky. It wakes me in dreams where warmth surrounds me like the embers of a grand fire still twinkling under a layer of ash. Slowly, he will unwind from his placement as I do the same. Speaking the same language inside our minds that rarely have the opportunity to be heard. Distance means nothing when your energy can reach across oceans, when your night birds visit you in slumber and moments of contemplation, when everything you need to break free is within your grasp.

Story by Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

Within this mind, I drift away through torrents of dim light and thoughts that devour my soul like wildfire that can’t be contained. The blood boils, and as it rises, I begin to destroy anything within reach. In my most turbulent pain, nothing resembles importance. Destruction is all I crave. The shards are what bring satisfaction. I don’t need these THINGS.

All around my feet lay the remnants of the past. If I threw it all away perhaps a sense of peace might grace this tortured soul. The pain swallowed me long ago. My possessions became barter for poison; my body a vessel for others extraction only to refuel myself with numbing I so desperately needed. My limbs become unrecognizable with every injection that keeps all the visions and feelings suspended in a bubble I never want to burst.

Sitting and despising the choices I’d made. Letting myself be there for everyone else but myself. Sometimes thinking it would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always greater than the pleasure of its devourer. The bones pile up around me. Dead lovers… Dead friends…yet I continue because I haven’t found any other way to make peace with any of it.

There is a boundless darkness where the unscrewed, unreasonable mind of mine travels. I am void of a heart that feels and gives pleasure to what my soul and mind are thirsting for. It is an immediate release that I am in search of, but it all goes down the black hole; this abyss of failed attempts to bring meaning and feeling to my life only creates barren caverns. The place where I get stuck, get half swallowed and want to put my self to sleep forever. My wings have turned to a thickened black mass weighing on me like a mountain.

Kneeling amongst the shards strewn about the floor, naked, cut, blood streaming upon my skin. I question everything about my being. What I’ve endured, what I’ve done, who I’ve done it with, the cost of all my actions and inactions. There I lie in a spinning frenzy of thoughts that all come down to never finding resolution within myself, feeling purpose, feeling an honest meaning. I find a way to debase it all, and after the fire rages, the ashes cascade upon me like snowflakes, leaving a trail of tears and hatred as I blow them off my stained flesh.

The angel of death lifts my body. The shards shrink in size as I am carried higher and higher. Symbols arise as my eyes close, swept into the softness of the finest cashmere. All there is in this moment is growing warmth…nothing else matters.

The gifts my father destroyed on my sixth birthday, even busting the last balloon I hid behind the speaker, it doesn’t matter.

The gun inside my pussy while needing to finish off three men just for a bundle didn’t matter.

Watching a person I loved die in my arms as he watched his bubble float further away didn’t matter.

Not being invited over to other kid’s houses because I was THAT kid from THAT family didn’t matter.

Being gang raped at thirteen, then tossed into the winter air with shredded clothes like a piece of trash didn’t matter.

The pageant queen that turned into a juvenile delinquent, being locked away over and over, fed pills and treated like a disease didn’t matter. The hundreds of atrocities faced by this soul, the shards of a cruel existence piling up like corpses in a massive open grave were miles below me as I entered another realm.

The jolt upon being dropped and awakening to rubble, trembling, my own name hard to recall felt like being shoved down a rocky cliff. At the bottom, I could smell my grandmother’s hands dressed in white lilac lotion. Recall the feeling of being in the middle of the forest with curiosity and adorned by the magnitude of earth’s beauty. The sensation of my skateboard wheels gleaming off surfaces, body and board, one entity. The salty sea breeze filling my nostrils as I watched the sunrise, filling my pockets with stones. The people who dared to look into these eyes and saw nothing but a gorgeous soul that resembled the stars.

Amidst the bones and my mottled flesh, surrounded by the shards that resembled a life I was trying so hard to discard, my breath reminded me that I was still amongst the living. Clutching downward, sweeping the scattered pieces towards me, I began to feel pain. Not just the sharp edges slitting me open. It was these jagged deformed pieces that caught my eye, creating a desire to make them into a beautiful work of art, unrecognizable as the broken and disfigured shards they once were.

In the brief moments of clarity before the haze thickens again, the urge to rebuild this life, distilling from that bubble a little bit at a time, to reconfigure the shards, building a pathway over the bones, declawing and unbinding these wings, to choose to be intact, kick starting the ability to be whole and not lie victim to a disjointed existence where I have lost total control. My hands touch my face and I begin to feel the structure of its form.

Winding Spiral

Story by Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

There is no vow left that I foresee making other than to myself. I have no control over others and do not wish to instill my will upon them. Relying upon the winds of change; the ever-flowing currents that bring one’s soul precisely where it belongs; all these years have led up to this.

There is no desire to live where once I stood still. That place of solace or dissidence, whichever it held, is gone. My intestines swarm with the rumble of expired fuel, locked away and spoiling beneath the sun, a place where some say I belong and deserve; a place where I fall down and dwell, yet I’m beginning to realize there’s so much more.

The back drip dissolves like poison inside my throat. Curled around my leopard blanket, I am shaking and waiting for something that never comes. I am aching all over. The burn is traveling at light speed through my veins, taking up residence inside my bud of flesh eager to release the build up. I embrace my fragile bones and go inside of myself, questioning whether to hide or bare my flesh, giving birth to electricity that may unite every part of myself.

What once was this fragile part of me is now fisted and split open. The tunnel that gave passage to children, the drain hole of blood and membrane, the place of ultimate desire, the place where I can trigger my own euphoria, the place that others defiled and I had to spend countless hours in shock, scrubbing myself raw and still nothing washed the pain or filth away…That child from so long ago stares at me from the corner, reminding me to forgive and let go, to make peace with all the things that have devoured me and caused me to question even my own pleasure.

Every time I thought I had found love I was left dying inside, my intuition thrown on the backburner because my idealistic fantasies took hold. Each time, I thought I had learned my lesson, but lessons unfold over time. Awareness comes when you feel like you won’t sink under the weight of it. That little girl is all grown up now in the physical sense; her ghost haunts me, stares at me just as deeply as this eye I can’t keep closed, the eye that speaks to me who I’ve ignored so many times. I’ve got plenty of growing left to do. The spiral beckons progression, nothing more.

My eyes that have been windows to my soul have often been clouded to the path before me, that sense, that searing eye, gut giving me information yet I turned my back and buried myself away in fantasy, into the dust that settled around my trembling body. Contorting myself, giving myself away needlessly without any reciprocation, silencing the voice that is the only thing I can trust. My heart lies bleeding, my mind rampant with thoughts and images I want to black out. The intensity is something that needs reigning in.

The nightfall is everything I await. The sun’s intrusive, blinding light makes me feel things I’d rather keep hidden. Part of me wants to dance and ignite but I pull the drapes closed and block out the outside world; too much uncertainty, too much pain, too many what ifs. My mind can take me on a vibrant journey without stepping foot into the world that has largely disowned me. My soul trapped staring out through eyes that prefer to stay shut. Fear of myself, fear provoked by all I’ve experienced and witnessed, it crashes down on me like torrential acid rain. How do you take pleasure in yourself, others, and the world around you when everything is spinning, surreal, leaving your skin numb, sitting in the dark with masochistic thoughts to deny myself any pleasure, leaving the thought of orgasm dangling in front of me like the sweetest carrot I’ll never reach.

Retreading back into my lair, suspending the fall into the void that’s so easy to enter, I pull open my skin once more, exposing my dripping wet flower to myself. Tracing my fingers around the folds, attempting to feel. Winding inward and recalling all the senses that come with this part of myself I’m still trying to understand. It doesn’t stand alone like an object on a shelf I pull down and admire. It is connected to my mind, my heart, and my third eye. Maybe I can feel. Maybe I can chase away the ghost in the corner, embrace everything that has wound me inward to this moment, clearing the fog that has deluded the depths of my intuitive spirit.

I fall in love all over again; attempting to tear down the guard I’ve placed all around me. Rewinding the stories in my head, all the times I’ve died inside, alongside those who claimed to see me and made promises to adorn me in support. I barely trust myself. My mind plays tricks on me. My flesh often lays unresponsive. The fires that need rekindling are buried just below the surface yet even with lips spread wide open, the access is limited. I fall down within the spiral web that binds me to this body, forcing open my senses and guiding me back to where I can once again stand up and not collapse.

In this swirl of imagery, there was a voice that came from somewhere I least expected. Eyes that carried a universe as expansive as mine. Thoughts that were in sync with even my most torturous nightmares. Seen. Somehow, I was seen despite the clarity I often felt I lacked. We awakened one another’s world. The spiral had wound inward, drawing together two souls, two minds that speak in tune, dispelling the fear that perpetually had us hanging by a thread, each day the flames slowly emerging, gaining height, the warmth holding me tightly. I questioned this. Is it possible to allow someone else into a world that often feels like a nightmare on full display?

It doesn’t matter whether I am ready to drown myself beneath the weight of my past or raising into the purple glow of the sunset, he is there. He is solid. Despite the mess laid out before him or the beauty that I contain, he is at peace and makes peace with me through it all, upholding me with two hands alight in flame that draws me closer, my thorns retreading giving way to my blue pools that want nothing more than to take gaze within the hazel irises that swathe my soul as if we are on a distant planet where nothing exists but our hearts beating, our flesh barely in separation.

The intrusions upon my flesh, body and mind taken hostage, the apparition of my youth dangling in webs that cloud my mind, the sting of throwing caution to the wind and forgetting what my gut was ringing into my mind’s eye… it all is eased with the knowing that maybe just once I can trust another soul to be beside me. For once it feels like the pain is lifting and there might be a place where I can reside in another’s presence that doesn’t misshapen my sense of self, the love that I hold inside bursting forth, the eyes that can stare through the brightest rays of the sun and the blackest of depths that bring to me to ruin. I can pause and take respite, regaining the ability to listen to myself, clearing the view for the eye that penetrates me, allowing its sight to feed me, connecting the parts of myself that have scattered over countless tormented years.

My petals unfold for him out of love. I kneel down and pause for a long while and debate what I feel, where I’ve been, what my intuition is whispering into every part of me. Nothing feels wrong and as time passes, it only feels more secure. He wants nothing but my happiness and my words to shed light onto the sunken pages that dead kings fight for. From the depths, I greet him. The flames are in full display. He draws me ashore like a mermaid ready to trade her tail for legs. The parts of me that have been hidden underneath layers I could never peel back are becoming exposed. I will dive into this new chapter, casting out the fear that has paralyzed me, allowing the spiral to wind me inward, purging my flesh and mind of poison, blossoming for him over and over again.

Shallow Grave

Words by Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

Within my body lies a scream forcefully gaining strength.
The bloody images painted across my mind ready to burst forth.
Remains inside a garbage bag I once called home.
A trail of memories that only brings me down.
Discarded youth rotting like a corpse tossed into a ravine.

The repeating black funeral perpetually buries me in a shallow grave. It is painful to wake. Sleep comes after desolate hours of brutal contemplation. Upon blacking out, my only thought is to never wake up.

Forever hiding myself, tucked away inside my mind.
Alone within a sea of people, my mind is racing.

I stare at faces and hear their voices but I can’t connect. I plan my exit. Leaving all the people behind to once again be in stillness but the rage takes over. No matter where I go, I’m stuck with this head. The head I’d like to disassemble. The head I’d like to blow off; the head that tortures me and pushes me down a hole. Will any moment ever feel real or am I here to linger like a ghost?

The instinct to fall back into the realm where I swarm with racing thoughts begins. Down inside the caverns of my mind, there is warmth despite the chill that runs up and down my spine. The caustic images project onto the walls I’ve closed myself in.

My departure from the sun, from the hands outstretched creates solace within the grave I have half buried myself in. Torturing myself is better than allowing treason onto this soul and this flesh from others; others who can’t reach me; others who don’t see all that I am. The soil, my blood, the night sky, it is my only blanket.

The mountains draw me in. The magnetic force is a pull that can’t be denied. They beckon me to drive myself deep into the wooded mass. Taking sanctuary amongst the fern, creatures stirring, and the knotted trees that define my waking hours. Burying myself alongside the blooming fungus and medicinal plants takes me down into a world where I am connected. Running my hands across the roots of twisted and uprooted balsam alleviates the distortion in my mind.

I throw myself into the recess where once a mighty oak stood proud but is now cast over on its side, a wall of root raises itself to the canopy. Tucked within the pool of mud at the base of the uprooted, I coat myself. I blend. I shut my eyes and disappear.

Cells begin to disperse into the energy the holds me in an orb, hovering above the endless sprawl of forest. Within the wood, what has always been lost is found. Fingernails feel stronger clinging to the mounded earth. The energy enters me as I dig, spread and crawl. Nothing within this fragrant utopia causes me to startle. Not like the screams I heard in utero. Inside the depth of a twisted tree I find my strength. Her roots consume me and together we stand tall again.

Her and I, we are unforgiving against the blasts from what threatens our survival. Tucked slowly, infused into the trunk, stretching my arms into hers, we are one. Hidden and taken into cover, I will sink no more. We feed and are fed. We are above and below under the gaze of the moon. The darkening all around our limbs, the twilight coming to a close and the infinite universe streaming within and around gives birth to a new awakening.

In the mountains, far from everyone that displayed treason upon my soul, I am tall, I am strong, I am tucked inside the wooded realm where all makes sense and I can’t bleed anymore. Symbiotic relationships are in full bloom. The wretched world is left behind. Taking in the water from far below and the glimmer of light that occasionally graces this winding, stretching body that extends further each day. We are in union reclaiming what is ours.

BOUND

By Lara Noel

Illustration by Alex Thorfinn

I woke upon sunrise. Undoing myself from the knotted rope still tight around my waist, thighs, and breasts.

Next to me lays the master that roused my flame and drew back the curtains that fell hard against my shape before he put me on my knees. In his eyes I obeyed, without me he’d be nothing, and without him I’d still be searching for a way to be controlled inside this cruel world. Feeling his strength made me feel safe. The burn of the rope that I accepted let me fall into a place of discipline. The tighter it wound, the closer I felt to feeling my search for structure had ended.

He had unwound me enough so I could rest. Although the ritual had ended, I feared coming totally undone. Breaking free from these binding forces, I rose naked and spread my bare feet onto the ground. Unmasked, untied, barren from the enclosure all around my limbs.

At peace yet starting to feel anxious. The wind began creeping over my flesh, casting my hair into my face. The burning eye gripping me, tumbling paralysis returns, creeping through my veins. Feeling toxic, I crawl.

Crawling across the rocks next to the water, the black hole began to churn inside me. The tentacles no one else saw were calling to the sea. An underwater labyrinth had been vivid in my dreams for years. The need to be coveted and under the pressure of the dark water gave me warmth where there was none. I needed a safe place to spread myself wide open, no fear, and no tests upon my mind from the people I detested. In bondage, I was held and could align myself with my own thoughts, focusing on just one person. The world became small. It felt better that way.

Holding myself tight and glancing over the swelling waters, the foam changing colors by the second, I had gripped myself tightly. Knees against chest, arms wrapped around my legs with my head tucked in like a serpent within its egg.

The tears began to flow, washing away the grit on my body. Looking back from where I crawled, the realization was this was home. The binding force of the outer and inner coming together made me feel whole. I accepted all I was ordered to do because I was drained from the chaos that ruled my world.

Somewhere down in this abyss of flesh and frequencies humming lays a goddess unsure of her destiny. I trace across the rocks with my fingertips, rubbing harder and harder. Nails splinter as the release comes coursing through me. Unwinding myself to feel the shape and texture of my surroundings performed an act of awareness that could never be taken back. Spread across this landscape of minerals, I brought energy up through all my pores; grasping all that had been an illusion, what is present, what hasn’t been seen. Bound to this earth.

Pain aided me to feel alive. Whether from the burn of the sun, the stinging nettles in the yard, the crack of a whip against my pale flesh, blades entering my skin. It all establishes a rush so far inside that a dissection couldn’t pinpoint the origin. Held tight inside a web of fibers, the tools that would force me open and demand I accept what followed, triggered a response of suspense, yet all was at my consent.

Allowing all of this upon me let me be in control of what it was I was going to endure. These were my terms, my destinies unfolding. I was allowing myself to feel these things. My choice. My obedience. No one was forcing me against a floor with their cock in my throat and blade tightly held up against my neck. This wasn’t being held down by the societal standards I so despised. This wasn’t being the victim once and for all. It was being bound to my own desires, purging out all that didn’t fit. All that had enshrouded me in relentless anguish that caused me to drown myself in pills.

The sea is staring back across these limbs, tugging at my eyes, her soul and my soul in union. My inner eye opens as parts of me unseen begins unwinding toward the edge where current could wrestle me to the bottom of the ocean, burying me within the ancient grains of time that make a bed for creatures best left out of sight and mind; A silent wall that beckons survival in the dark, reaching inward to pull out the infestation in my mind and heart; soon to create the influx of energy from the all seeing eye; The eye that has bound me and set me dangling over the world like a lost satellite.

Traipsing back to where my master lies, I place myself by his side. Erupting with the yearning for his commands. Lying still, closing my eyes, I’m ready to give myself in tune to others this way forever. The sea turns over and over, the crashing spilling into my closed lids. My body lays naked on the sand and rock. I refuse to crawl under the blanket. My body prefers the goose bumps from the salty, wet breeze, the earth slowly infusing me with its energy that has risen from far below. I get back onto my knees awaiting what comes next.

Rearview

By Lara Noel

Photograph by Alice Teeple

In an unforgiving state, I draw backward. Time has elapsed; here I sit, in the present with decay stacked up like old books that have nowhere else to go. The dust is settled down, wearing away at the edges, and taking my scent through a vapor trail that is unforgiving and unstoppable. Reconnect with your past, that’s what all the therapists and books say. Well, I’ve already connected the dots, and here I lay, survivor amidst piles of rubble, clawing my way to the top.

Left alone in my father’s care left me wondering in the most abstract of ways. Was I a child, a plaything, a fixture, a sex object, or another threat to his growing paranoia? All these things wrapped up into the firecrackers he tossed at me to cure my anxiety induced constipation at age four. In my rearview, I still see his sinister look as he closed the door.

At night, he’d tuck me into the fort I spent all day building. Halfway through a story, his hands would start their slow journey of disturbed comfort. As the intensity would grow, I’d slip deeper into the caverns of my mind.

At that age, you don’t understand what is happening, you’re just there, like a statue being admired and photographed. Stone cold, no sound, no movement. Solid in form, you take what is bestowed, but in this I was robbed, as if I had been carried away to Satan’s lair.

Didn’t everyone else’s father gratify himself with his child, decipher messages through the radio, leave them alone in the ghetto because a helicopter flew overhead signaling the enemy was closing in, jerked off to the neighbors while chanting out his own language while Rush blasted so loud the walls were almost coming down?

All I wanted was a father. In those moments of my flesh being traded in for fairytales, I got to feel my father’s fingers enter my cunt. Stimulation feels good, and when you’re that young, you don’t know any better. Any attention sometimes felt better than none.

If he ignored me, I felt confused and lost. While he pissed in empty milk jugs because had he flushed his piss in the toilet the government would have his sample, I stood by wondering why I just appeared like an abandoned piece of furniture.

In those moments of denial and confusion, I went into my land of make believe, stealing flowers out of neighbor’s yards because I deserved something beautiful. Creating worlds inside and outside but mostly in my head, rocking up against my wall at night until I was so numb I passed out.

Days seemed to blend into others. No one was around. My grandfather’s answer to my situation was buying a microwave, state of the art back then. I could heat up or cook food without the danger of using the stove or eating raw meat, which I often did. Hiding under the table and ripping apart the flesh with my teeth like a hellhound.

As I ate my burning hot leftover egg drop soup and watched MTV, I imagined myself being a rock star, or a witch; a black star that others would bow to. I wanted to feel seen and heard, not forgotten and used like I’d always been. I craved power.

Sometimes the burning and dotted bruising in my thighs was so harsh. If my father hadn’t shaved, he’d leave a trail of red down me I tried so hard to erase. It appeared like a trail of blood from the clawing of monsters that filled my head each night the stars ceased to ease my mind.

I had accidents at pre-school, getting whacked over the knuckles for wetting my cot again. I crawled into the cots of other children, just wanting to be held, maybe acting more sexual than a young child should. Under a blanket, I wanted to feel safe and loved, and then was brutally disciplined because this was not appropriate behavior. But that was my world. I didn’t know any different.

At that point, it occurred to me that I was in a world all my own where time had stopped and I was skirting along the edge of a knife. Everyone was watching when I would take that fall. They wanted my dismemberment. I was a disease. I didn’t fit in. I rotted along the pretty girls. I became someone who lived on instinct alone, a primal creature with heightened senses. Anywhere I looked, anywhere I walked, there was no place for me there. Cast out, labeled, put aside, forced to witness and endure things I’d rather not. Forever alone, the rearview piercing into me, the more it revealed itself; the more I attempted to hide.

I dismantled my playthings. I picked at my skin, tossing all the dolls out of my toy box and hid while the terror ensued. I was locked away until the fights were over, crying until blue orbs were the only things in view. My room became a graveyard. My father took pictures of me undressing and redressing. As the Polaroids popped out, they were snuck into his pockets. Another part of my innocence buried in that room. Each time the older boy from upstairs dared me to do things in my closet; I obeyed, and then laid in absolute stillness, boxed in a coffin for what seemed like eternity.

At 10, my father handed me a joint and Bukowski, telling me never to tell my mother about that or anything else. It was a gesture that felt right but his request kept me enshrouded in the darkness that grew more each day. Color became the enemy. Deconstruction was underway. I watched the needle on my record player piercing the vinyl and creating sound as I smoked. In that moment, there was no rearview, just nonlinear time and space that brought the warmth I was missing.

A bare mattress in the basement where we’d once lived fell in and out of view as the high lifted. The ray of grow lights for the budding marijuana plants came in and out of view as “daddy” injected me with a needle, insisting I needed rest because my nightmares kept me awake all night. In and out of consciousness, I felt the weight of him atop of me, glimpsing the fuzzy glow, wondering if someday I could play with the kids next door without my father calling them niggers, if my used EZ bake oven might work again, if the hole I made in the backyard and filled with water had collected frogs, if I could be alone and eat a creamsicle and watch the clouds burst without fear consuming me.

I turned to look over at the music I’d stockpiled in my room. Lost in the artwork, lyrics that assembled like steps out of this prison. Sound would alleviate these thoughts. Sound would carry and comfort me. The Wizard’s hand was reaching out to me. I grasped it tightly and found a new place to dwell.

Lara Noel (IG: perception_is_subjective) is a mistress of darkness with a thirst to unfold the inner workings of her mind. Born and raised by music and mythical creatures, her feral spirit endures unremittingly. A self-described beautiful mess and co-conspirator of waking the fuck up, she currently resides in Woodstock, New York with her beloved doom cats: Sabbath, Dio, Ghostface and Loki 2.0.

Alice Teeple (IG: aliceteeple) is a freelance band photographer, artist, and filmmaker from Woodward, Pennsylvania and active in the New York City scene.

Faces Unfamiliar

By Lara Noel

Illustration by Patrik Alex Thorfinn

Your eyes and presence once became my sanctum. Caught within your army of self-doubt, I stood by, examining the dismantling of the man I entrusted with myself.

My skull was busted wide open, up against a creature I no longer recognized.

Lying in a pool of my own blood, my moon ceasing to turn over, waxing and waning hanging in the balance while you vanished into a world that locked me out.

I felt like I would wither like winter ’s garden, a pillow of dust in the widening of the clouds, the sun giving forth its light exposing nothing but death. My soul crushed like the hollow shells of insect bodies snatched up by the wind. My breath felt stolen, my heart dismembered, all completely snuffed out.

Every backward step you took away from me, from yourself, the beast that hungered to devour became stronger. You fed the wrong wolf. At first glance, we appear as pristine creatures, yet so easily transition into the very demons we attempt to hide, rather then learning to embrace and balance both sides.

We battled faces unfamiliar, sitting back-to-back, afraid to view the other. It became a war we waged upon each other and ourselves; our insides exposed like an autopsy, horns in full display. Our power locked away in a cruel world of our own design where we ultimately became each other’s prey.

I sit with faces unfamiliar, tiptoeing in my new existence while the moon and sun change phases, honoring the deep glow and shadow that highlight our footsteps, well placed across our garden where you once brought forth sound.

It rings through my daydreams, presenting me with the currents that live to ease my pain; the blanket that will stiffen each night you fail to drape my limbs, recalling the violence that ravished my world.

Bowing down at the night sky, beckoning out for recovery from the form we entered before leaving the womb, splitting into a duality that tugged at us endlessly. A lesson in acceptance we are both experiencing, yet all I know is the rhythm and progression of my own actions. Your journey is unknown to me.

Tight within a watery grasp, a knowing that changes shape in shallow water; right before my eyes, your face, unfamiliar, appears. I recall how you drew deep within my gaze, my blackness that kept your secrets safe. I will bind together courage and the will to stare deep within what often makes me feel like a walking dichotomy.

You were once more than I ever could have asked for. So much more than your flesh, a soul that wound itself upon the edges of my curtain, burrowing inward. Yet you burned down the house that contained them, the pain having nowhere left to go. In the flames I saw a rage that scarred my sense of everything that had embraced me.

Sifting through the ash, all that is left is the image of what used to be a sunset colored galaxy destroyed by a tidal wave of fear. Faces unfamiliar, back-to-back, two forms that were intertwined yet now being ripped apart. Balance never restored, bringing the black ships of hell to our core.

The dragon egg sat in the frigid cold. My body coated this creature with ice when your eyes grew dark and your lucid dreams stopped you from approaching my shore. As I bled, I felt purged of what then felt like a disease instead of a creation of love. Collapsed on the bathroom floor, I felt my demon taking shape but I tucked it back inside. It had already taken my sacrifice.

I felt drowned in the rain all around me, the pitter-patter of ghostly footsteps in the dark, dismantled and dethroned. As I rose, I tossed this crown to dissolve in the fire that is slowly gaining force, dissolving my tears and the clouds that have been hovering above me too long. I’m on a quest to make peace where once there was madness.

The memories of your horns in the shadow of the moon are dissipating along with the sound of your voice and guitar. I sit here, staring in the mirror at my distorted face coming back into focus, mending my wounds. Sitting with a face no longer unfamiliar as I repair the fragmented parts of myself under the full moon.

Lara Noel (IG: perception_is_subjective) is a mistress of darkness with a thirst to unfold the inner workings of her mind. Born and raised by music and mythical creatures, her feral spirit endures unremittingly. A self-described beautiful mess and co-conspirator of waking the fuck up, she currently resides in Woodstock, New York with her beloved doom cats: Sabbath, Dio, Ghostface and Loki 2.0.

Patrik Alex Thorfinn (IG: lordthorfinn) is an arist and also the guitarist/vocalist for the doom metal band Coffin Torture, based in Westminister, South Carolina.

Serpentine

Words by Lara Noel

Illustration by Chloe Lux

Twisting in serpentine movement across this dusty floor. The inventions in my mind cause me to squirm and slide. I’m trying not to retreat back into my disassociated state where I fall into existential crisis.

I trace the threads of the rag carpet on the floor. Binding myself as I weave myself in tighter and tighter, curled like a slug around its precious egg.

Dressed in layers of clothes and my mother’s lingerie, headbands, bandanas, I cover myself to hide away my body; the skin that I often want to peel off. All this peach, soft beauty is something I don’t see when I look down at myself or in the mirror.

I see scales that I want to pick away. I see a corpse that still wants to jump rope and play hopscotch. Contorting on this floor yet trying to find a steady rhythm. It’s the only thing that helps block out the screaming and blood being spilt between people who are supposed to love one another and make me feel safe.

The destruction swirls around me in a thick haze yet I keep my focus on my limbs, my scales growing harder, and my fake mermaid tail sweeping the floor.

I get dizzy and retread to my room where the large windows beckon me to stare out into the night sky. I’m hungry yet filled with all the darkness that floods through my windows, bestowing me with a sanctity that transports me into another realm. The sparkling stars make me wonder what else there is in this life, this world, and all the frequencies that seem to exist.

Around my arms, I feel the energy creeping all around me; baby snakes winding around my wrists, tighter and tighter until the pulse stops and I’m left in a parallel dimension where time does not exist.

More and more, I feel like a captured serpent sliding up against the cold glass. My movements aren’t natural for a child. Forever I am on the outside looking in, on the wrong side of the pane, peering through a stained window that illuminates disfigured creatures.

I wind my tail across the floor and slither further from the sound I do my best to block out but into the background it spills into my unconscious mind, invading my dreams, my innocence, it robs me of many things, and so I coil.

I curl into the fetal position that keeps me safe and warm. I chase the demons away by becoming something other than who I am, what I am. It changes me yet creates a powerful being that can shed it’s skin and increase it’s size and presence a little bit at a time.

Soon they will not be able to keep this beast at rest. I will wrestle with everything they’ve stolen from the beauty I portrayed in sundresses, making forts within the willow branches, an innocent child that only wanted to feel safe and watch the stars out her window.

Poison is what I was fed yet I lived to beat down the visions and voices, the people who wanted to rape my body and mind, a strong, winding mind yielding the tools to disengage the destruction. The serpent with one eye open at all times that stood watch, hidden in unforeseen corners. I overcame the disembodiment of my youth and grew into a force to be reckoned with. My scales turned from a prison to a glistening sheen in which I found a glow no one ever gave me.

I swallow my prey whole. I take what I must to survive and continue to grow, lurking in the corner, watching, waiting, and creating dreams to live while I still can.

GREY

Words by Lara Noel
Photograph by Alice Teeple

Escape for a little while, the grey storm outside your eye. It poses nothing but the reflection behind eyes that have turned black staring at cold, ice streaked glass.

Retreating backward, slowly collapsing toward the place where it is a struggle to dream, to wake, to repeat the thoughts that you had yesterday. Pinned down, an imposter within your mind, flesh, the identity that you disown daily.

Bodily functions run a test of treason. Scratching and making sounds recalls the animal that is all we are. You wail, crawl, and pound your fists against the plaster wall. More chunks pile on the floor; the dust settling into your eye, more suffering. Head replaces fists, faster and harder. The banging relieves the mental anguish and sends a rush of numbness down your core, back to the ritual of putting poison in my veins. Deep inside the high, you recall the red flowers on your grandmother’s lawn, the tulips that arrived every year with the pointed tips and variegated leaves. Arriving in time to see them in the freshest hour was pristine, a perfect moment.

Collapsed in silence, you so easily forget, because you don’t want to remember, and you hate forgetting and you hate that you don’t want to remember but that’s what you do, It’s the struggle; That constant fucking struggle.

Back inside the grey cocoon thoughts disassemble inside the soft box that feels so warm but in an instant can turn so cold. It’s the black and white, the black and white. THE black and white. Grey; Grey all around. No one likes the in-between.

On the back, in the front, above and below, reflexes stage a show no one can see. Eyelashes flicker, muscles convulse, toes curl. An apparition: your youth haunting. Your youth hanging like a thick black cloud.

A thick cloud that disperses, and within your ocular curve, it’s fuzzy. There is no doubt that shutting down all your senses it what has to be done.

The foreboding intensity of the storm gets closer. It creeps along the carpet and up your spine. It floods. It becomes. You are taken over by the flood, by the grey water filling your airway. Lying in the waters rushing over your body. The putrid flow is washing over your body and swallowing you whole.

Water, it was always cleansing, but this ominous binary compound is not the ocean you recall from the sunny days along the eastern seaboard. The dried cracks along the lines of your face from days of losing control grown long and deep. Skin from pale to ashen, it darkens. The grey skin appears like mottled flesh on the verge of rigor mortis setting in. The death inside your skin begins winding inward to the mind that has been wasting from the numbing and loss of a sense of living. An existence has taken over that becomes an endless waking to a darkened room full of shadows; full of images that illuminate the walls in black and white; a movie being played without sound.

Under water, the muffling is blocking the resemblance of voices, of the voices that used to consume your mind.

Sound. Sound was your first memory and now it’s gone. Nothing can replace it anymore.

Watching the blood drain from your veins and falling into a deep sleep has become something more than anything that has been grasped by hands, by heart, by the intellect that used to confuse and upset everyone around you. They didn’t understand. They pushed and you pushed back harder. Grey matter floated into the empty spaces that held the smell of lilacs streaming through the window, the bright yellow of the daffodils that sprang forth through the crack in the concrete at the edge of the street and the yard. The blue sky that held bright white clouds that shaped and shifted while you felt the blades of green between your toes and the tickle of wind up and over your chest; the perfect warmth of the sun that held you like a womb.

There is no basking in any glory, in anyone’s eyes. Your hands resemble what was and what could have been, and deep inside a barrel of a gun, deep within the tools of your disengagement. Grey, spread across this palette that defines this moment. This space. This life.

Deep within four walls, the shadows grow sharper. The room grows colder. The storm is building as your eyes draw shut. Tugging at the torn wool blanket that barely covers your limbs. Every hole and tattered edge lets the chill creep in.

Stuck within the nod that defines the position of your head, there is no ability to change placement. One with the flood. One with the storm. Grey from head to toe.

Lara Noel (IG: perception_is_subjective) is a mistress of darkness with a thirst to unfold the inner workings of her mind. Born and raised by music and mythical creatures, her feral spirit endures unremittingly. A self-described beautiful mess and co-conspirator of waking the fuck up, she currently resides in Woodstock, New York with her beloved doom cats: Sabbath, Dio, Ghostface and Loki 2.0.

Alice Teeple (IG: aliceteeple) is a freelance band photographer, artist, and filmmaker from Woodward, Pennsylvania and active in the New York City scene.