The Grit of the Divide

The smell of hot asphalt after a summer storm is a sharp, metallic sting in the back of the throat. It is the scent of a world trying to hold its breath. I remember the feeling of walking barefoot on a road that had been baking in the sun all day; the heat pushed back against my soles, a stubborn, pulsing rhythm that traveled up my shins and settled into my knees. It was a dry, unforgiving texture, like sandpaper against skin, contrasting so violently with the cool, damp moss I would find hiding in the shadows of the nearby trees. We are always standing on the edge of two different worlds—the one we build with our own hands, hard and unyielding, and the one that breathes beneath it, soft and indifferent to our presence. How much of our own skin do we leave behind on the surfaces we walk upon, and does the earth remember the weight of our passing?

Sukesh Kumar has captured this tension in his work titled Beauty and the Beast. The way the path cuts through the landscape feels like a physical scar on the skin of the world. Does this image stir a similar ache in your own feet?