The floral sculpture in this piece was designed by the brilliant and gifted Maurice Harris of bloom and plume in LA. Taking the form of a human heart made of flowers, I photographed it to appear as if it’s hovering over one of the seven energy vortexes embedded in the landscape of Sedona, AZ. Maurice created it in the shape of a human heart complete with valves and aortas . The heartbeat is one of the final acts of a dying body; once it ceases to function the vessel is done. An impossibility in form and place. These flowers would never be able to survive in this landscape, but it floats above the desert emboldened by its own impossibility.

When Sterling and I were diagnosed with AIDS he became very sick almost immediately. He had so many opportunistic infections attacking his body that it shut down almost immediately after we were diagnosed. Little things that any healthy person wouldn’t ever think about had piled on one after the other and we had know idea. A bacterial infection from the soil that he loved to tend, an infection from his sweet cats, internal bleeding, and a few other ailments. He was admitted to the ICU at Vanderbilt for an unheard of three month stay. The medication he had to have for each of these infections was so hard on his body that they could only be treated one at a time. The doctors put me on anti-retrovirals immediately, but they feared his body wouldn’t be able to handle them until his other issues were taken care of. He was released in the fall but was taken back in less than a month. He didn’t come out of the hospital after that.

I’m so grateful for the work and advancements that have been made in medicine and especially on the HIV/AIDS front. But there’s something that happens to you when you’re both taken to the same brink of death and only one of you comes back. They call it survivor’s guilt and that’s such a short name for something so large.