Crystalline

So this is how you see me, then.

A shape against the snow. A dark interruption in all that terrible, perfect blue. The camera's eye is steadier than yours. I can see your breath rising in small uncertain clouds as you frame the shot, and I wonder which version of me you're hoping to capture. The real one, perhaps. As though such a thing exists.

The cold has its teeth in me now, proper cold, the kind that makes one feel improbably alive. My hands hang useless at my sides because I haven't quite decided what to do with them. There's never anywhere natural to put one's hands when someone is looking this intently. The body becomes a foreign country.

Behind me, the pines are doing that thing they do at dusk. Becoming suggestions of themselves, soft-edged and mythic against the fading sky. The chalet exhales its yellow light into the blue like a held secret finally released. And here I stand, caught between the warmth I've left and the lens I'm facing, neither here nor there, which is perhaps where I've always been most comfortable.

You're taking too long. Or not long enough. Time does peculiar things when one is being witnessed.

I could smile. I could arrange my face into something easier to look at, something that wouldn't ask so much of the viewer. But the cold has stripped me honest, and there's something almost restful in simply standing here, offering you nothing but the fact of my presence against all this indifferent beauty.

The shutter clicks.

Did you find what you were looking for?