Capture If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door. ~Janie Starks, Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

The colors of the world aren’t so. Distorted light. Gray is purple. Red is pink. See the world through matte colored lenses. The world wanes before us. Before the certainty of the sun or the shimmer of the moon. Beginnings and endings. A repetition of beginnings and endings, an endless story, a middle. dawnduskdawnduskdawn Smoke is the color.

 

 

 

Members of my family take inordinate amounts of pictures of sunsets, sunrises, mountain ranges and cloudy skies. I have inherited this propensity, to my dismay. Years later I will peruse my photographs to find little evidence of myself, but plenty of indistinguishable horizons. It is the same sun, after all. Viewing these pictures conjures memories, but they last only so long. Yet, I am compelled to continue saving clichéd moments that will be lost once the shutter closes again. What is it we are trying to capture?

 

At eight, I used to think murderers from slasher movies lurked outside my bedroom door. Even at eleven, I considered the possibility of hands grabbing my ankles from beneath my bed. I felt I was too sophisticated for the monsters in the closet schtick. The lights flickered for a split second and then darkness collapsed in on itself. We had surveyed our surroundings in the light, and yet my first instinct was to extend my arms as if to feel for obstacles in space. I knew there were none. Yet we wriggled our toes, studying the terrain. Our bodies lost their edges. Voices bounced off walls, betraying us. Sensory overload. I once spent an entire day wearing an eye mask, to see what it is not to see.

 

 

 

I find myself searching for light in the same way I search for love. My friends and I have taken to exploring roofs of tall buildings around Providence in hopes of finding the perfect romantic spot. Her skin is dusk, olive, smooth and unblemished. She tiptoes in the light. I imagine her face bathed in pink reflections, her eyelids narrow slits as she contemplates the edge of the horizon. If only she were less illusory than the answers I can’t seem to find in the frame. As hopeless as it often seems, my blind faith has convinced me that eventually I’ll find something.

 

Walls danced to the candle light inside the cave. A single tree-root hung from the ceiling—although you can’t really say it hung, because it was taut, reassuming its search for solid ground in the floor of the cave. Nature’s instincts to form a solid foundation. We blew out the candles and sang. We felt amazing grace’s echoes. An underground cathedral. Sometimes warmth comes from something other than the sun.

 

 

 

I sat behind the dugout, looking up at the New Orleans evening sky finding myself unable to make sense of this moment. We came here to heal, after all. So why were we watching a baseball game? The sun makes its daily rounds, even when we are not prepared to acknowledge it. The morning after Katrina must have been breathtaking. I wonder if anyone noticed. It is the same sun after all. But as much as they might look alike, each piece of light is a deliberate mark of the progress we make in our own lives. Little checkpoints that only the photographer can take note of. So even if you think my images are beautiful, they cannot mean the same thing for both of us.

 

Skylights heat up the room. I wake to sweat on my brow. Nine in the morning and already the clouds have abandoned their dubiousness. They are all white and conformist. Rectangles of sunlight creep across the bedspread and across my eyelids. This was the morning when life became inexplicable.

 

 

 

My favorite light comes on brisk October evenings. A bit after six. Leaves scurry across pavement and through blades of grass and wind whips my eyelashes. Clouds resume their tricks. Skyscrapers offer perspective, turning the city into a snow globe, sans snow. And waves, ripples, make everything twice, and the horizon is a binding dissecting a watercolor spread across two pages.

 

When the sun is low enough in the sky, you cannot tell which way a person is facing. A void of light, a negative space where light should be, two dimensional, front and back indistinguishable. Is she coming or going?

 

 

 

I close my eyes and the shape of the sky tattoos itself on the inside of my eyelids. It hovers there in the blackness, a purple outline, following my darting eyes back. And forth. And back. I squeeze them shut, and the horizon is obliterated by a jarring flash and the onset of white noise. I lose my balance and then I am floating through space, tiny white sparkles flitting past me. Occasionally I see spots in the sky. They are transparent and almost like little targets. I have considered the fact that maybe I can see atoms, that I have macro vision. Then I remember that I can’t see a face ten feet away and I realize that I’m dehydrated and lightheaded.

 

My father gave me a vintage camera a long time ago. It’s somewhere between the kind the photographer puts his head under a towel and squeezes a perfume pump, and the disposable kind. It takes endless exposure pictures, meaning you can keep the aperture open and let light expose the film for as long as you wish. Perfect for tracking celestial patterns. Sometimes a thoughtless press of the button will do. Other times I find it imperative to line up the horizon perfectly with the frame. What is it I am trying to capture?

 

 

 

Pitch black. Sometimes I think objects offer warning before you stumble into them. They emit a ghostly presence. Other times I trip. Light is irresponsible and fickle and playful. It is unforgiving and imaginative. It comes and goes without asking. We seal it in film, so that it may not leave us forever. When we tame it, time ceases linearly, our minds swim in it. It pools like blood, ethereally.

 

Sometimes a streetlamp is all that separates me from emptiness. Sometimes, the moon.

 

 

 

You are defined by your actions, not your thoughts. I believe that, I think. I put it on the internet so that people would think I think that. But I’m most comfortable in solitude. Most comfortable with daybreak and dusk. Most intrigued by myself when I am not engaged, but when self absorbed—deep in my self. Most intrigued watching others sort out their thoughts. The mystery ceases to be what I’m capturing. What does she think? Morning is my beginning. Night is my end. In between I am malleable. Occasionally I am offered a glimpse of the cumulative. Present or absent, light is the only hope I have of preserving myself.

 

Photo credit to Toby Milgrim for picture of the fading face. Capture was written with inspiration for works by Annie Dillard, Jenny Boullie and Jean Toomer