From my wonderful Sally

Ruby is sleek blood red hair and red lips and dark eyes.
Ruby is op shop dresses over big black boots and stripy stockings and shoes, always shoes. She is obscure yet somehow always fashionable couture (she can make the strangest assortment of clothes look fabulous). Ruby knows you are looking at her and wishing you had her coat or her cowboy boots or her confidence to walk around looking like a bohemian indie queen.
Ruby is a big red Monarch Butterfly with the intensity of a supernova; when she loves you, she loves you fiercely. Sometimes it can knock you to the ground but it is always potent and passionate so there are no spaces left in your being to make you feel lonely. When Ruby kisses you she will always remember your name. Ruby is abnormally attracted to sin – it colours her world technicolour; like scratching back black crayon from a rainbow background. Ruby has blood roses growing in her hair and belladonna on her wrists so be careful because if you hurt her she will poison you. Ruby is a garden.

Ruby lives in a crumbling Victorian town house with columns and poison ivy and a balcony from which she can hang fairy lights and smoke weed. Ruby lives with her best friend Sally – Sally believes that she is a faerie, and so she only eats flowers and speaks in poetry and writes love letters to strangers because she is afraid to love the people she knows. Ruby looks after her though - she makes her eat her vegetables so she doesn’t waste away and teachers her how to love real people and not just the people in her books.

Secretly, Ruby is a hopeless romantic – however, she has learnt that life is not like a fairytale, that it is not black and white, good and bad, hate and love and that is all there is to it; she knows there are one million shades of grey. But she does know that reality has its own obscure, abstract, razor-sharp beauty, where raw pain can be transmuted into art and a million emotions will turn people into human time bombs, with hearts exploding in a cloud of glitter and violet butterflies.

Ruby can capture these moments with her camera (Ruby is a photographer). Through her lens, Ruby can see into another dimension, where the sky is ultraviolet and where landscapes and limbs and eyes can tell a thousand stories. Ruby knows that she can change the world through art, because her photos capture little pieces of the souls of her world and present them for people who otherwise cannot see a perspective other than their own. Ruby’s photos are mystical, enigmatic, mysterious, raw pieces of film flesh; you can taste the radiating emotions and smell the petrichor and feel her messages in your heart. Ruby sometimes takes photos of Sally; in these you can tell that Sally is a faerie, and sometimes Sally can see that she is pretty, but her innocence always shines through – she wishes she could be edgier, like Ruby.

Ruby doesn’t drive her car much – she worries about the environment and global warming so she rides her vintage bicycle, the one with the giant handlebars, everywhere. She likes to ride down to the beach when it’s raining, take off her shoes and take photos of the grey ocean. She also likes to ride the train to places she doesn’t know and explore, looking for new stories to capture; they are always hiding, but she has a sixth sense for these things, and so she can always find them. Most like to hide under the train station or in the trees or down the dark alleyways.
Ruby loves walking and running and singing and dancing and kissing in the rain, and bicycles and umbrellas and boys who aren’t afraid to wear skinny jeans. She likes writing messages to people on the public toilet walls and telling secrets to strangers and books about love and books about travel (in her mind, she is always travelling) and faeries and trees and colorful stockings. She likes people who go against the grain of regular society, she likes gay people and she likes straight people and she likes scars. She likes pretending to be young but she is more mature than you, because she knows the world is so much bigger and more beautiful outside her little soap bubble. She knows you cannot always trust your eyes as a primary sensory organ, she knows intuition is just as important – Ruby follows her heart.
Ruby is going to change the world with her art.

- By Sally Ophelia, my best friend xoxoxo