ごめんね

I have always found it difficult to apologize. The closer a relationship becomes, the harder it is for me to be honest. There was a time when I could apologize openly to my wife, when she was still a stranger to me. As we spent the same time together and inhabited the same space, the distance between us certainly grew smaller. The person who had once been a stranger became family. And yet, even as that distance should have continued to close, I began to feel that it was expanding in another direction. Still, without any particular intention, I continued to photograph my wife. But as I kept taking photographs, and as I looked back at them, I realized that what appeared in those images was not the distance between my wife and me. It was the distance between the self who wanted to apologize and the self who still could not. Distance was not something that existed between myself and another person. It had emerged within a single body. In the process of someone moving from stranger to family, I came to perceive clearly, for the first time, not the distance between myself and another, but the fact that the self is not whole. Perhaps the words “I’m sorry” are not simply words for repairing a relationship. Perhaps they are words that appear only when we first recognize the existence of that distance. These photographs are not a record of my relationship with my wife. They are a record of the moment when, through that relationship, the distance between the self I wish to be and the self I actually am was first revealed to me as something visible.