Page 7 of These Tears

Something simmers beneath the disappointment.

Crane hadn’t been indifferent. Guarded – sure. Defensive – definitely. But not indifferent.

He reacted to books. To being asked real questions. To his name. That was more than he’d probably meant to give me. Whether it was annoyance, instinct or something closer to nerves, I couldn’t yet tell.

Before I turn the ignition, my camera bag catches my eye on the passenger seat. Pressure builds at the base of my chest.

Elias Crane isn’t a breakthrough. He is not a distraction.

I repeat both lies as I start the car.

After I miss the first junction homewards, I find myself wondering which book might make him speak for longer than a few sentences.

He gave me almost nothing, and I’m already turning the absence into an invitation.

Because I’m well aware he noticed the addiction to corruption in me too. That should be my only warning.

Should.

But it’s a hook instead.

2

‘How’s this supposed to help, exactly?’ Marina grumbles at my side, while holding up a small branch for my camera.

Peering through the lens, I adjust the aperture until the bark blurs just enough to soften into the background, while the twigs frame the storm clouds beyond.

‘It’s the moment right before something breaks,’ I say. ‘The sky is holding back a scream, the branch wants to snap. Everything is caught in that last breath before the collapse.’

I imagine he might understand it. A man who chooses words as carefully as Crane might see what I see without me having to explain it.

The image freezes as the shutter clicks.

‘So ominous,’ Marina grumbles, more to herself, as she lowers the branch with a scowl and tosses it onto the sodden path.

I’ve never had a thought like this cross my mind while working, but suddenly, I wish I were more like her. A photographer who finds beauty in softer things like laughter, sunlit fields, all other hopeful things people write poems about.

But I never have.

Her lens follows the last red flower in the meadow. Mine turns towards a tree split down its centre.

I’ve always been drawn to what remains after the impact: the silence, the damage, the shape grief leaves behind when no one is watching. That’s what I know how to capture.

The evidence that pain leaves behind.

In the body. In choices. In everything people can’t say aloud. Perhaps that’s why I trust it. Perhaps that’s why I think he might too.

And right now, it’s the only thing I know how to offer him. Clouds and lightning.

‘I’m not giving him the darkness,’ I muse aloud. ‘I’m giving him what comes at the end of it.’ Something that feels both like relief and freedom. Or the closest thing to it.

‘Right,’ Marina says, but her tone disagrees. ‘I’m sure he won’t take one look at the dead bark and clouds and say you’re weird.’

I consider that for a moment.

‘I’ll write on the back what it’s meant to say.’ I’m aware I don’t yet know Elias Crane well enough to gauge how he’ll take this, and that most people wouldn’t see beyond the bark and the clouds. And if books are the one place he bares his teeth, I can start with that – pair the right quotation with a printed photograph, see if it causes a change. Ride the next wave from there.

Because I can’t stand silence for long; it starts to feel like failure.