Slightly Off

hroughout the entirety of my life, the view I take in has always seemed slightly off. Even in this photo, the buildings angle in strange ways, the yellow stripe is off-kilter; and yes, it was the wide-angle lens, but it was also the perspective I believed most worth capturing — mostly shadow, a little light — angles. The feeling of emptiness in a city that is far from empty.

When I played guitar during my youth, I could never keep a beat. I still can’t. I never noticed until I was in college when I tried to record a song for the first time and my dear friend, who plays guitar for a living, looked at me like I was crazy. Even now, if you catch me thumping my foot to a song, listen long enough and I’ll fall off.

Thinking back further, growing up in church, when we clapped for Jesus, my clapping would, without fail, fall away from the clapping of others around me.

It’s always been a problem.

Like with anything in my life, I try to ascertain what this small eccentricity means. The short answer is, I don’t know. And this used to bother me. I wanted to strum a guitar right, clap right, find the centered perspective of a photograph.

Then again, maybe it was never supposed to be that way. Not even the Earth rotates around the sun in a perfect circle.

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