We've known each other for almost half our lives. I've seen you smiling, confident, blissfully happy. I've seen you broken. wounded lost. But I've never seen you like this.
A/N this is what chris looks like in the story for rn.
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We went to your dorm room because you promised me lunch. You wanted to go onto the roof with your camera after we ate, you told me, and take some pictures.
"For the Spectator?" I asked.
"The paper?" you said. "Nah. for me"
In the kitchen I got distracted by a stack of your photos black-and-white prints taken all over campus. They were beautiful, bizarre, bathed in light. Images zoomed so far in that an everyday object looked like modern art.
"Where's this one?" I asked. After looking for a while, I realized it was a close up of a birds nest, lined with what like newspapers and magazines and someone's essay for a French literature class.
"Oh that was incredible'" you told me. "Elizabeth Olsen- Do you know her? She's in the theatre? Robbie Arnett's girlfriend?- she told me about this nest that she could see out her window that someone's homework got worked into. So I went o check it out. I had to hang out the window to get this shot. Liz made Robbie hold my ankles because she was afraid I would fall. But I got it."
After that story I saw you differently. You were daring, brave and committed to capturing art. Looking back, I'm guessing that's you wanted me to think. You were trying to impress me, but I didn't realize it at the time. I just thought Wow. I thought He's wonderful. But what was true then, as has been true as long as I've known you, is that you find beauty anywhere. You notice things other people don't. It's something I admire about you.
"Is this what you want to do?" I asked then, indicating the pictures.
You shook your head. " It's just for fun, " you said. "My moms an artist. You should see what she can do, these gorgeous enormous abstracts, but she makes a living by painting small canvases of Boston sunsets for tourists. I don't want that kind of life, creating what sells."
I leaned against the counter and looked at the rest of the photographs. Rust leaching into a stone bench, cracked veins of marvel, corrosion on a metal railing. Beauty where I'd never imagined it could be. "No," you said. "He's not."
I had stumbled into a fault line I didn't know I was there. I filed that away— I was discovering the landscape of you. You were quiet. I was quiet. The TV was still blaring in the background, and I heard the newscaster talking about the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The horror of the situation rushed over me again: I put your photographs down. It seems preserved to focus on beauty then: But looking back, maybe that was exactly the right thing to do.
