What comes after love?
Usually, Tuesday.
The world has lousy manners when it comes to personal tragedy. The subway keeps running. Coffee goes cold. Someone marks an email URGENT when it clearly isn’t. And you, who until recently had built an entire future around another person, stand in the kitchen trying to remember why you walked in.
That’s heartbreak: a private catastrophe in the middle of a perfectly ordinary day.
Gabriela is a Colombian actress living in New York. She delivers painful truths through bad jokes, which makes her exactly the person I would ask for advice.
We met two years ago. Since then, cities, jobs, mistakes and a few broken hearts have passed through our lives.
So we asked:
What comes after love?
First, the debris.
A song gone bad. A restaurant you stop visiting. A trace of perfume capable of ruining a perfectly decent morning.
A broken heart is not empty. It is full of things it no longer knows where to put.
People talk about healing as if there were a way back to who you were.
There isn’t.
Love changes whatever it touches. So does losing it.
So what comes next?
A particular kind of stupidity.
Gabriela and I agreed that love and photography share it. Both require faith that something worth seeing is still out there.
If I believed I had already taken the best photograph of my life, I would leave the camera at home.
No reason to go out.
No reason to keep looking.
Sensible, perhaps.
But love asks for the same foolishness.
One story ended.
That’s all.
The world didn’t.
There is still too much left to see.
Photography and Words: Alexander Tarazona
Model: Gabriela Moreno
Location: NYC
