2 #2
And despite my heart threatening to grab onto the rising panic attack and ride it out to oblivion, I can’t stop thinking that she’s right. Every word cuts clean, each one justified. But none makes the weight in my chest any lighter.
‘I must’ve done something to push him away.’
The thought comes too easily, which is probably the problem.
My parents taught me from a young age that when bad things happen, you search inwards for the reason.
And if Sartre’s right and hell is other people, then maybe I’ve built my own and trapped both Ron and me inside it.
So of course I’m already doing it with Crane after one meeting.
As if every rejection has to mean there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.
As perceptive as Crane is, he’d probably locked onto that flaw and recoiled.
But is a woman’s worth truly measured by how long someone stays?
‘As if!’ Marina barks, hurling herself against the driver’s door. My self-loathing and my faults crash into her where she stands firmly beneath the onslaught. ‘Some people are just fucking arseholes!’ she snaps.
I bite the inside of my cheek. Because the rational part of me suddenly takes all those insecurities and flings them into the body of water stretching behind me.
‘Is that your new favourite word?’ I murmur through clenched teeth as I reach for the door handle beneath her armpit.
She frowns at me as though I’ve insulted her war cry. Then she softens just a touch. ‘You are worth it.’
My lungs seize around a breath.
Have I said something aloud while spiralling into myself?
She says it casually, like it costs nothing.
I feel it, too. For a brief moment.
Then it slips away again when Ron’s voice crawls back into the space Marina opened, followed by my parents’ reprimands.
And that is the problem.
This is why I need more time – because when someone says something like that, I want it to stick. To find somewhere solid inside me and stay there, rather than slipping through the same old cracks.
I need to find whatever piece of me still believes that’s possible.
Week after week, I send a photo to Crane. Rebecca – the programme coordinator – never reports that he has refused them, so I tell myself he must be keeping them. I start watching for the postman more often than I should.
After the second week, Rebecca leaves me a polite voicemail reminding me that the messages on the back must remain relevant to the placement.
By week three, she leaves me a polite voicemail about appropriate boundaries.
By the end of week five, I ignore the existence of the word appropriate altogether.
I trawl through ebooks for lines from old classics and philosophy books to write on the backs of the developed photos – little tests, really, to see whether anything gets through. His file said he had studied philosophy, so it could be hit or miss.
The branch-and-storm photo got Rumi’s ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’
The week after, I dropped my teacup on the front porch. The spill fanned out in jagged tendrils, and the morning fog licked around the edges, eager to join the scene.
‘I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.’ I channelled some of Carl Jung’s certainty into the words and sent them to him.
There were other small offerings too. But no reply ever came. Not a word. Not even a note from the programme coordinator.
Then, finally, I mistook a fox for something monstrous in the woods near Burrator one day. It held its ground in the bramble, teeth bared, yellow stare fixed on me as if it enjoyed the wait. It reminded me of Crane at that table. Afraid, but dangerous anyway.
So I decided it would be the last one – my final photo after two months of trying to breathe life into this effort.
Mary Shelley had the right words. Hard enough to sting, but not enough to wound.
‘A fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.’
I wrote it on the back, pressed the photo into an envelope, and let go of another project that was meant to keep my mind off the self-pity.
And two days later, just after I decide not to flip off my laptop at the obscene price on a snowsuit, the postman drops a small white letter through the letterbox.
Such a clean, ordinary act. It shouldn’t have got my chest in an uproar when I saw it happen.
As I pick it up, I examine the red stamp smeared halfway across the flap: Checked by Mailroom Officer – HMP Stonebrook.
Excitement sparks inside me and I hold it between light fingers as if it might burn me.
I walk to my kitchen table with suppressed urgency, my thumb moving over the edge without thought. By the time I reach the chair, curiosity is bleeding out of my every pore, and I have to force myself to let go of the letter.
Several long moments pass as I stare at it resting on the table. Because it might contain rejection as well as something worse. But since hope should be dosed in small amounts after all, I finally reach for the flap.
Opening it carefully, I find a matt-finished photo inside. Of the fox – slightly warped at the corners the way photographs get when they’re handled too often.
My stomach plummets.
He returned it.
But when I flip it over, the breath stutters right back into me.
Beneath my quote, in ink several shades darker, another sentence rolls out in impossibly neat cursive – too disciplined for the violence my imagination keeps trying to assign to his hands.
‘Where is this from?’
A few words should not be enough to loosen the knot in my sternum. Somehow, they are.
A smile pulls at my mouth.
After all this time, he actually wrote back.
Maybe he kept the others, after all. Maybe he recognised the earlier quotes and didn’t need to ask. Or maybe this one simply caught his attention in a different way.
Either way, he answered.
And now? I can’t stop wondering: why this line?
Does he think I compared him to a monster?
With lungs full of static, I tear through my drawers for a pen and paper, pages flying in every direction.
Back on the chair, pen poised, heart in my throat, the rhythm of my finger-tapping against the barrel infuses me.
Control the panic. Make a plan.
‘The fish is circling the bait,’ I whisper to the photo, eyes locked on his handwriting. Then, because my mind always has to make things uglier than they are, I think: now how do I keep him talking?
I scribble the address first, drawing out every letter to postpone writing the note itself.
His name sits at the top like a curse and a challenge.
Drifting to the bookshelf, my gaze settles on the battered old Frankenstein volume wedged between two art books, its spine cracked and softened with years.
I start scribbling:
‘You can read it yourself.
‘I’ll bring you the title,
‘If you lend me your face.
‘The book will come with me – if you let me see you through my lens.’
It might backfire, I realise.
It might make him feel cornered, like I’m trying to condition him into playing.
Scowling down at the note, I watch the tip of the pen hovering as if it could rearrange the words on its own into something safer and less blah.
I’m just about to crumple the paper when the front door creaks open, then shuts like a verdict.
My head snaps up. My sister, Anna, stands inside the door.
Breath leaves me too quickly.
One eye is bruised purple beneath her fringe.
My lungs collapse in on themselves. Then heat floods my ribs as my eyes flit all over her form in worry.
Outside, autumn rain needles the windows, blurring the coldness beyond the glass into streaks of grey.
Wordless, seething, I tuck the note into the envelope and abandon it on the table as I rise to my feet, ready to go into battle – until I recognise two suitcases wheeling behind her, leaving faint wet trails on the floor.
My fists open. The air trapped in my windpipe leaves in a broken rush, and my knees nearly follow it to the floor.
‘Oh, thank fuck!’ I blurt, stumbling forward and throwing my arms around her as if I could anchor her there with the sheer force of my embrace.
She had finally left the bastard.
Relief swallows the noise of the world. For a while, at least. There are bags to carry upstairs, tea to make, questions I know how to ask carefully. Because Anna and I have been here before, at square one, when I left Ron. We know the laborious mechanics of resetting a life.
Over the following days, I carry the thought of the letter around like contraband, turning it over in my head. Every possible answer feels wrong.
Too warm – and I sound desperate. Though I am.
Too clever – and I sound like I’m performing.
Too blunt – I risk making him recoil entirely.
I don’t want to disgust him, don’t want to invite him too close… I don’t want to compromise this fragile thread he has thrown my way.
So I go through the motions of life with his handwriting burning a hole in my brain, answering emails, packing and shipping my prints, answering emails, pretending I am not composing and destroying sentences in my head every waking minute.
Today I’ve had more orders coming through my online shop, and the work around them drives me downstairs into the darkroom.
I check my photographs for flaws, trim and package those already cured, then peg the fresh prints along the drying line.
There’s something liberating about the work that comes after I pull the art out of the camera.
Seeing the glistening prints as they dry always drags a smile to my face.
It helps, having something to do with my hands. Something with steps and an ending.
Just as I hang the last photo on the string line to dry, Anna calls me from upstairs.
‘Coming!’
Yesterday, we drove out to Burrator so I could take more photographs, but my head had barely been in it.
The drizzle misted the lens more than once, but I didn’t even curse.
We took a few pictures that Anna labelled goofy and princess-pretty and called it a day.
We’d both needed some time off from the world and the reality.