Can I mix these?

My shelf is a strange kind of portrait, because I am not in it. It is a row of objects on a ledge, bottles mostly, turned so the labels face out, and yet I keep it the way I once kept photographs of myself. In good light, arranged, meant to be seen. Somewhere along the way the shelf became a way of saying something about me without my having to appear in it.

I learned to pay attention to skin in Seoul, and there the routine was never quite the point. It was the surface of something else, a slow kind of noticing that happened to involve a lot of small steps. You sat with your face for a while. The steps were how the time got spent, not a thing to be counted so much as a thing to move through, the way you might water plants without tallying the pots.

By the time that habit reached my bathroom here, it had been translated into a number. Ten steps, people said, the way you would say ten reps. The noticing had become a count, the ritual a stack of products with an order to defend, the face a surface to be managed toward a result. What arrived in Germany was the shape of the thing with the attention drained out of it.

And so I photograph the shelf. I think this is why. When the paying attention leaves a practice, the objects are what stay behind, and I point the camera at them because they are the part I can still hold. The shelf documents a routine, but it also documents a loss, the quiet one nobody mentions, of a habit that used to be about looking and slowly became about owning. The bottles face out. They are very beautiful. They are keeping something for me that I half remember.