Click.

The shutter falls closed with a satisfying sound, a metal lotus closing its petals like a venus flytrap. Click. And unfold again, gracefully as those who are free and insane. For the briefest moment, I wander barefoot on morose and stormy beaches, the white of my creamy skin and starch gown glowing against the black gains.

But then the eye opens again and I am suddenly aware of the precious slide of negative film I have wasted in my haste for euphoria. I am disgusted.

Before, it was painting. Slaving away endlessly over dull and greyish pigments, mixing blacks and whites, purples depressing yellow temperament. It was never perfect, never right. I watched this canvas be carried away and a blank one placed before me, out of little more, it seemed, than spite for my quixotic idealism. My art teacher subtly forbid me for working on any projects outside of class, knowing well that I would work on them obsessively till Armageddon. Still, even as I stood before God and awaited some fearful judgement, I would not be satisfied. They were never good enough. Whenever they came close, tragedy struck. It is not that art is as fickle as the human soul. Merely, it is that the hand holding the brush shakes too severely to capture the vision. Even I was inequal to the task.

Photography is my latest stint in trying to capture time and beauty. It’s simplicity is deceptive, almost alluringly so. Without its science, it is more or less an action of mechanics: focus, click, develop, print. So simple, so easy to sneer at. “Without grueling effort there is no art,” they say.

But I know better.

There are tribes in foreign lands who forbid all camera usage by tourists. They believe that the mirror-metal blades will steal your soul; it will soar out through your eyes and settle on the tongue behind the camera’s black teeth. This is my aim, my goal. This is what I imagine every time I turn my lense to an unsuspecting face.

I want to steal their souls. The essence of the person, the moment, the very liquid that fills their irises. Take it, preserve it. Point, click.

But it is not complete.

There is no sound to printed pictures. There is no smell, texture. You can’t taste the orange they’re eating or hear the wind trying to pull the trees to their groaning knees. It is mute. Untouchable.

All my prints live on the wall above my bed. They glare down with a blind and stupid anger. At night I become my photographs. I gaze down from my perch at the girl on the bed: all muscle and hollow bird-bones, a strong cover-slip over an empty box. Ice Queen who embodies loneliness and doesn’t care. Jezebel who has no desires of her own, or has hidden them so deeply they’ve been warped by the cold of her core.

Lately I am interrupted, my loathsome meditations cut short be electronic bells. Dim cyber light ‘pon my cheeks and words that sing but have no sound:

CC: talk 2 me. im bord.