Photographs, memories and an idea

A gush of wind blew in through my rectangular window. I kept an ink jar on my table to make myself feel blue in the mornings and sometimes when the pigeons came and sat on my balcony I tried taking their photographs. It wasn’t hard to capture these calm birds, they were camera friendly. Often it so happened that they would look me straight into the eye,through the 18mm lens. I wondered what they were thinking, although I always made sure that I catch them unaware, as beauty is most exaggerated in the moment when the beautiful is elsewhere, her spirit is not aware of trapping itself-it’s careless pulchritude captured through someone else’s aesthetic sensibilities.Sometimes when a thing like that happens without coercion and with optimal timing, a photograph is made and it can move worlds. Perhaps the first requisite for being a good photographer is not being a good observer; it requires you to be a good stalker, but then I don’t want to pique other sensibilities.

I once took a photograph of a girl who could move the world with a wink. It was the very last picture of her I had ever taken. I asked myself, what of beauty? Why her? The answers were never easy.

Her short stories were written in the sands of the shore. She was aware of the wavelets that could run over their fragile existence. In a way that’s why she wrote them in the sands of the shore. Her stories breathe life; they existed and they didn’t want much to be. All those stories including her ever wanted was being read by the right eyes, being read with the right heart, just in time when the stars would slant across the southern sky. I wish I had read them in time. As far as the wavelets were concerned they weren’t tumultuous or wicked-they were just systematic and they were just following the natural cause of things. They flew wherever the wind took them. They washed away life and they washed away her stories.
You see, nine out of the ten problems in the world were because none dared to disobey the wind. What to do, Addie?

 Let’s just follow the wind. Let’s drink to that.

The last time I took a picture of this beautiful girl, she looked away, her long hair graciously teasing the monochrome which I intended to portray- and then she gleefully accepted her fate when I weaved her beauty and beamed it all over the world, when I sold a part of her spirit for audiences to wallow in it,to appreciate it, to be moved by it, to discuss it over supper tables, unaware of the stories that made her- the ones she wrote in the sands of yesterday. Like her forgotten stories this too was fleeting, and as the deluge of the new washed away the memory of the photograph, she too withered away from my life.The wavelets of time never justifies regrets, that’s why when I am lonely I often think that I should have not loved her through a photograph, I should have read her stories when it existed- as for people like me love is not a photograph rendered from memory there’s nothing visual in it, not now, after all these years. Love, I know now, is a pleasure felt in the heart- aloof from everyone else’s spectacle, true only to the self. I was young, and what could I have known back then.

Like I said, these days I only photograph pigeons and party goers, and all that love and beauty I was talking about is locked away somewhere in a safe.
The key is lost.