The art of seeing love

Small Steps Forward

Sarah's apartment greeted her with its usual silence when she returned from work that evening. The space felt different now, though—not quite as empty as it had that morning. Something about writing in her journal at the café had shifted her perspective, ever so slightly.

She dropped her keys in the ceramic bowl by the door—a wedding gift she'd made for her sister years ago, before deciding to keep it for herself. Her fingers lingered on its uneven rim, remembering how the clay had felt beneath her hands. When was the last time she'd done something creative just for the joy of it?

Her phone buzzed again. This time, instead of another dating app notification, it was Emily.

"Pottery class. Thursday night. No excuses," the text read, followed by a string of emojis that made Sarah smile. Sometimes she wondered if Emily had a secret ability to read her mind.

"I don't need a hobby," Sarah typed back. "I need—"

She stopped, deleting the words. What did she need, really? The answer had always seemed so simple: love, connection, partnership. But sitting there in her quiet apartment, with the last rays of sunset painting her walls in shades of pink and gold, she wasn't so sure anymore.

"Count me in," she sent instead.

Opening her laptop, Sarah found herself navigating away from her usual rotation of dating sites. Instead, she pulled up her neglected photography portfolio—another passion she'd let slide in her relentless pursuit of partnership. The last upload was from eighteen months ago: a series of portraits capturing random acts of kindness between strangers on the subway.

A notification popped up in the corner of her screen. Someone had liked one of her old photos: a black and white shot of an elderly man helping a young mother carry her stroller up the station steps. The username caught her eye: CoinDropper_Monday.

Sarah's heart did a little skip. It couldn't be—could it? The guy from the café? She clicked through to his profile, finding a collection of street photography that made her breath catch. His images captured the same kinds of moments she'd always been drawn to: small gestures of human connection, fleeting instances of compassion, the poetry of ordinary people moving through their daily lives.

Before she could stop herself, she typed a comment: "Your work reminds me of all the stories we miss when we're too busy looking down at our phones."

The cursor blinked at her for a long moment before she hit send. It wasn't a dating app message or a carefully crafted profile. It was just... real.

Standing up, Sarah walked to her hall closet and pulled out her old Canon camera. The battery was dead, but that was fixable. She turned the familiar weight over in her hands, thinking about all the moments she hadn't captured this past year because she'd been too focused on finding someone to share them with.

Her phone pinged with Emily's response about Thursday's pottery class, followed immediately by another notification—a reply to her comment on CoinDropper_Monday's photo: "Looking up is terrifying sometimes. That's why I hide behind my camera. But every once in a while, someone helps you pick up your scattered pieces, and you have to wonder if maybe that's the real picture worth taking."

Sarah smiled, set her phone down without replying, and began charging her camera battery. Tomorrow morning, she decided, she'd take a different route to work. There were so many moments waiting to be captured, so many stories unfolding in the spaces between hello and goodbye.

Maybe her own story wasn't about finding love at all. Maybe it was about finding herself first, about reframing the empty spaces not as absences to be filled, but as possibilities waiting to be developed.

Like a photograph.
Like a story.
Like a life.