Letting go

Like the staff photographer on National Geographic who travels alone because he can better focus his attention, I’m alone except I’m having trouble focusing the lens. Everything moves too fast and is gone by the time I’m ready to take the photo. I’m disappointed, but not terribly so. I’ll have photos, just not the ones I originally intended. One boy looks up from the drinking fountain, dark-haired and I got a good shot with great light on the left side of his face, a three-quarter chiaroscuro photo.

Before I knew John and I were going to break up that last Saturday, after making love, we lay on the front couch, the light filtering through a crack in the curtain on his face, outlined in the barest of frames, it was quite lovely. He was asleep. But my camera was across the room and I couldn’t slip out from under his post-coital sleep to get the camera. And when he awoke, the light shifted and passed through the lens of his eye, illuminating it as it from within. As if I could see inside the depths of his soul. 

I’d never seen anything so beautiful and I had to let it go. I couldn’t take the photo, only in my mind’s eye. Had I known we’d break up the next day, I would’ve figured out a way to reproduce that photo, wake him up, and tell him not to move, but I hated doing that. The face freezes and puts on its mask when the camera comes in to or it’s closer close up. Sometimes it’s hard letting go.