Best read with this on repeat:
There were countless of thoughts running through my mind that time. I was pacing in front of our house, occasionally staring into the deep veins on the Palmera trees whenever someone would pass by and look. The girl in sky-blue pyjamas moving side-to-side and around in place would sometimes close her eyes. There were countless of thoughts but none of them about her neighbours.
Maybe one or two times, someone would pass by and I would wonder where they were going to or if they were looking. Once, a red truck with stacks of hay and sacks of soil drove through slowly, slower as they approached our house, and I worried that they were going to stop. I did not realise I had held my breath until I sighed in relief the moment they were out of my vision.
Perhaps it was around that moment, that moment blank in my field of thoughts, that I went back inside the house and walked the seventeen steps from the front door to the next. The sliding glass door to my office was open, and I only notice it now in memory. At that time, I simply moved through it, almost unconsciously, until I reached my desk.
“Ah, should I really?”
There was a stack of post-its on my desk, the orange ones that I had used to write the note for Mother’s errands. I put the stack back in the drawer behind my computer monitor and I closed the office door before continuing my aimless pacing by the front door.
Two steps out and I was back inside again.
“No, let’s . . . “
I walked inside to the cabinet were my old Canon 1100D was kept. Its black-and-orange bag was slightly dusted, but the rest was kept safe in the lowest level of the left-side cabinet.
On my way outside through the living room, the space between where my brain is divided, I held the camera in my arms, took the lens cap off to put in my left breast pocket, and held it like I had always did many, many, many years ago. In my mind was the image of the Palmera leaves, my view from the ground. I know the camera would not be able to take the image as how I saw it but it seemed like a natural subject for whatever this taking off was.
Yet when I arrived outside, I stepped into the earth, still in my day-old sky-blue pyjamas, beyond the front door, and walked to where the chopped off Palmera trees were. There by that corner of the garden, I took photos of the white orchids that bloomed quietly at the side—the side perpendicular to my glass-doored office but were, because of the shadowing of every work night, always out of my sight. That was the first time I had seen them in a while. It was the first time I had left the office and went outside, truly outside, that is, beyond the concrete entrancement of the front door.
I took photos of even the tiny leaves with the yellowish borders. I hope they forgive me for not knowing their name, but how they danced in front of my lens and highlighted its shallow depth of field made me feel excited. They even pointed me back to the first Palmera tree in my vision and its leaves danced too. The wind blew and a part of me wondered how I would record that music, yet mostly, I simply felt grateful to feel it hit my back and brush my hair.
“Music . . .”
I wished to dance; to dance as gracefully as the leaves were doing, to hear the music as clearly as they could. The music was faint to my feeble human ears, as if there were layers I could not make out of that would have wrapped me in its complete essence. Yet of what I could hear, I felt more than satisfied, more than honoured, more than liberated to enter a world I had left so many times previously but that always tirelessly called me back to its embrace. There I was barefoot on dirty garden steps entertained by the Divine. The plastic-and-metal body of my camera felt cold to touch: exactly what I had needed after lifetimes of holding onto unnecessary heat of what-have-you’s, of things everyone else holds onto. My burning palms felt soothed.
Time stops in moments like that because when the Divine wills it, one is showered by more than just a passing blessing. I was comforted not only by the wind and the gentle sunshine, the flowers and rustling leaves, the ideas and the epitome of beauty—no, more than anything else one can imagine, I was renewed, born again. In a split second, I died and came back to life, back to the reality where I had been and not a single moment had passed in my death. Everything was the same in that now everything was different.
My Canon 1100D still bore its scratched and missing pieces from those few times I had let it off my care, a constant reminder that wholly, naïvely trusting, comes with the risk of a broken focus and lost covers. Did I regret lending the camera, what was once the love and essence of my craft, to whoever-is-not-myself? What dangers it had faced simply because I, for a moment, did not care or was too preoccupied with worldly matters that now had left me too?
The answer, perhaps, does not matter. That is as kind to myself as I would go. Even in its weakened state, it calls to me lovingly and guides me to capturing the beauty of the world with our light. That maybe even when it could not do its job as well, it could still guide me to carry mine on. Because that is how it always has been. It was there only as a lens, by the eyes could always see better and there are always countless ways to capture beauty.
Only one must look and looking takes time, attention, life. Eyes are in pairs but they can only see one in every moment.
So while I did not know what would come next, I could see the next step and after that, the one that follows immediately. Maybe it is enough to see something and work around it, to take the necessary seventeen steps back inside to get what one truly needs, even if that’s a broken and old piece of technology that now barely sees the light of day. Maybe life is not meant to be seen in the most expensive lens, anyway, but in the ones that try, with eyes and hands that work with it for no other reason than to be witness to life as it is.