Anya #3
I couldn’t stop staring. It was like a compulsion when a memory had found me.
Suddenly, I wasn’t standing outside my gallery anymore. I was ten years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s car when she took me to my papa’s island. Papa wanted to sell it because Mama hated going to the Caribbean and she offered to take photos of it.
I could still remember the sea, that impossible shade of blue stretching everywhere. The white sand. The salty breeze that tangled my hair.
My mother had taken me with her to take photos of the island. That day she had trusted me with something very precious. Her camera.
I could still remember the weight of it in my small hands. I had lifted it to my eye and taken my first photograph. I remembered the click of the shutter. The rush that followed. The strange, breathtaking certainty that I had found the one thing in the world that made sense to me.
Photography.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced. And for years, it had been the only thing I wanted.
Until I met Jetmir.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that until I met Jetmir, I’d never understood how much a person could become part of a dream.
He never asked me to choose between him and my passion. He became part of it. Although he did want me to choose him over my family. But that was another story.
Our time together was short, but damn it, there were so many good memories we shared.
I remembered the days he had driven me along the Albanian coastline, searching for places I had only imagined in my head.
He had taken me down winding roads that seemed to disappear into the mountains, along beaches where there wasn’t another person for miles, and through sleepy coastal villages where the afternoon seemed to stretch endlessly beneath the sun.
I would sit beside him with my camera resting in my lap, watching the landscape change through the window, while he kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting casually on my thigh.
Whenever I spotted something—a stretch of coastline, an old stone house, a fishing boat rocking in the distance—he would notice. He would stop and patiently wait for me to soak it all in. To take as many photos as I wanted.
He’d never once complained. Not when I made him turn around because the light had changed. Not when I spent an hour photographing the same cliff from twelve different angles. Not when sunset approached and I insisted we drive farther in order to capture it from a different angle.
He’d simply wait patiently.
Sometimes he would lean against the car and watch me work. Other times, he would sit on a rock nearby, scrolling through his phone or smoking a cigarette, pretending he wasn’t keeping an eye on me.
But he always was.
He’d always noticed when the rocks became slippery, when the path grew too narrow, when the sun was beginning to set, when strangers lingered.
He had kept me company while I chased the light. He had kept me safe while I chased beauty. And somehow, he had become woven into every photograph I took. Even when he wasn’t in the frame.
And now, every time I pressed that button and the shuttering of my camera started, I felt him. I thought of him.
I could feel him behind me. I could feel the warmth of his hand at the small of my back. I could hear his chuckle when I was frustrated because a shot wasn’t turning out the way I had imagined.
He’d made room for my obsession. More than that, he had encouraged it. He’d made me believe I could turn those photographs into something bigger. Something of my own.
He had made me believe in myself.
And God, I loved him for it.
I couldn’t say this to anyone, but my love for him hadn’t faded. If anything, it had become a constant ache beneath my skin, an obsession I carried with me everywhere.
When I escaped him, I’d dropped out of school and built my own gallery with my own work. My parents thought it was because I was scared. The truth was that I finally believed in myself.
At first, people dismissed me as a young woman playing at being an artist. Then they started noticing my work and buying my photographs. Slowly, I expanded the gallery, bringing in the work of other distinguished photographers. I learned the business, and I forced Miami to pay attention.
And it had.
The gallery became everything I had once dreamed it could be.
But no amount of money, recognition, or success had erased where it had all started. My mother. And it sort of took shape in Albania around my husband with a camera in my hands while Jetmir waited patiently beside me.
I blinked, and Miami returned. The traffic moved. A horn sounded somewhere down the street. Someone laughed as they passed me.
I tightened my grip around my purse and forced myself to move.
The glass doors opened automatically when I approached, and the familiar scent of polished stone, expensive perfume, and freshly brewed coffee greeted me.
Inside, the gallery was already alive.
The staff was checking everything, adjusting lighting and checking labels. The white walls gleamed beneath the carefully positioned spotlights, each photograph displayed perfectly.
I walked farther inside, my heels clicking sharply against the marble floor.
“Good morning, Ms. Santos.”
“Morning.”
“Congratulations on the sale.”
“Thank you.”
“Thalia has been looking for you.”
“I know.”
I kept walking.
My eyes moved across the photographs without really seeing them. There were images here worth millions. Images that critics had praised. Images that had taken me years to create.
But all I could see was the Albanian sea. All I could hear was the click of my camera. All I could remember was Jetmir waiting for me.
Waiting.
That had been his gift and I had begun to wonder whether he was biding his time once again. His words still rang in my ears and they certainly didn’t sound like he’d given up.
I reached the center of the gallery and stopped, my gaze locked on the far wall where one of my photographs from Albania hung.
The print was faded now, deliberately so.
A rugged stretch of coastline beneath a pale afternoon sky.
The sea stretched endlessly toward the horizon, blue meeting blue until there was no clear distinction between water and sky.
I closed my eyes.
For one brief, unbearable second, I could almost feel my ex-husband’s hand against my back. I could almost hear his voice. Almost believe that if I turned around, he would be there.
I opened my eyes, the photograph staring back. He wasn’t here, but the feeling of being watched and foreboding definitely were.