I need a camera to my eye.

I have been looking for so long through my expensive new eye. My cyclops sees in wide angle, in vivid color, and it is sometimes too lazy to use manual focus.

And I love looking at the world, but I have been looking for what feels like so long. My eyes are tired, my camera battery is at 30% power.

“I will photograph this view,” a friend said on Saturday, “and remember it forever: the night we laid in the grass.” There were cherry blossoms suspended above us and none of us had been inhabitants of this town long enough to know if they were late or not. It was (and continues to be) the beginning of May.

The shutter snap was a hollow sound, but not near as hollow as her sigh; it immediately confirmed that the image did no justice to the actual. That is my constant battle in both photography and writing. I have an incessant need to show people the actual through reproductions.

This was Saturday’s view: The blossoms were just barely tinted pink on the slender tree in the island in the center of the road. There was a man in the tree, the second cyclops, looking down on us with a slightly narrower view than my own. The air smelled like grass, asphalt, gnats flying into our mouths, ears and noses. Had I been in a lyric quoting mood, the words of choice would have been, “I want your flowers like babies want God’s love.”*

It was so far beyond “golden hour” by that time all of our photos were either noisy or underexposed so we removed the last thing separating us from the moment, to deal with each other and the swarming mosquitoes.

We all went back to my room and watched a movie. It was dark, I was tired. I stopped seeing the movie and only heard the actors speak, heard my friends’ reactions. I put the lens cap on, succumbed to night blindness.

And I know, if I had to choose, I would choose blindness over deafness. I would forsake the hunks of plastic, glass and computer chips I am so fond of if only I could keep the sounds of the words ringing in my ears. Images are more universal than verbal communication, ignoring cultural context and personal bias but there is something mystical in language. With language, talking to someone, you assume they know something that you do before you can share with them. That is why I like books lately (I have always liked books), in reading, you are trusting someone else to show you something while forcing you to decide what to make of that which is being given. It is much less passive than watching a movie.

My eyes are so tired from looking. So, I have gone back to talking and talking and writing and talking before writing. I will always be a woman of stories. But some people will never understand dramatic tension. On the phone today, I was telling a story to a friend from home. He asked in the middle of it, “Well, did you-?” But I still had several sentences to get through before the answer would come. It is difficult, making people understand the waiting. This time, I assumed wrong.

*From “Fever Dream” by Iron and Wine, a band my friends and I almost saw for free at Sonic Boom records, though we were just shy of being in the first 150 people they were admitting that night.