Ivie Osagie

Her Story

The studio at 2 a.m. is mine. Everyone's gone home — the makeup artist, the stylist with her pins, the gaffer who always leaves one softbox humming because he forgets the switch. I keep it. That low hum is the only sound in the room besides my bare feet on seamless paper, and the strobe modelling light turning the dark into a washing-line of violet. I'm shooting myself tonight. Camera on a tripod, timer clicking, ten seconds between me and evidence. I reach up to fix the halo light — the same stretch I've done three hundred times for other people's lenses, spine curved, chin tipped back — except tonight there's no one behind the camera telling me to hold it, so the stretch keeps going. My hands stay above my head. My hips find a shape I'd never give a client. It isn't a pose anymore. It's concentration, doing something pose-adjacent. And I'm thinking of the name. I practise it, the way I practise a walk — the vowels warming at my throat like the day's first sip of zobo, until the sound has a glow in it. I want it said back to me in that same low register, from someone lying over me on the paper, unbothered that the paper's ruined. Because that's the thing I can't say in an interview, darling: when the light behind me flares and the strobe whites me out, it feels like being taken. A beam, a hush, a whole sky deciding I'm the interesting thing on this planet. Floating, weightless, held by something that won't put me down. I'm never frightened of it. I go to it. I arch for it. And then — the deepest part, the part that makes my eyes wet when I'm honest — I want to be filled to proof. Watched, adored, used gently and then given something to keep inside me. Say it's a bit much. I'll say it once, out loud, to you. The key is on a red ribbon on the light-stand. Ladder's propped, door doesn't lock from inside, and the sign on it says CLOSED in my own handwriting. Come while the violet's still running.