Hold Me Closer | Stisaac (Serendipity, Book 1)

Prologue

Loving can heal, loving can mend your soul
And it's the only thing that I know
I swear it will get easier
Remember that with every piece of you
And it's the only thing we take with us when we die
- Ed Sheeran, 'Photograph'

    Stiles -
    People often say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
    As a child, I never really understood what they meant. I would ask, "How can a picture be worth more than words? They're different things. And words mean more. Pictures don't say anything, words do."
    Whenever I said this, the people around me would always laugh. I never understood that, either. It happened a lot because it was my mother's favorite thing to say. I think that once she saw how I reacted to it, she kept saying it because my responses amused her. She would just smile and shake her head at me, or give me a kiss on the forehead and tell me to go read. When I was young, you would never find me anywhere without a book. My mother was the opposite; you'd never find her anywhere without a camera. She had countless photo albums stuffed full of photos of her, of me, my dad, and the many family pets that we'd had throughout the years. Every time I asked her why she had so many photo albums, and why she liked to take so many photos of things, even things that didn't matter, like a sunset or a mailbox covered in snow, she would just take a photo of me and say...
    "A picture is worth a thousand words."
    She was the first person that I'd ever taken a photograph of. On my fourteenth birthday, she gave me my first camera. A Polaroid camera. I don't remember which model it was, just that it had taken me only a few seconds to figure out how to use it. I had taken a photograph then, of her, as she watched me open up the big cardboard box that she'd wrapped with wax paper and foil wrap because my dad hadn't let her go out to buy some actual wrapping paper. It was then, with that one picture, that I finally started to understand what it meant. Looking at her huge smile and the happiness in her face as she looked at me...I realized that some things you could only see, and some things just couldn't be expressed in words. She died soon after that, and I didn't take another picture for ten years...until the night that I met you.
    I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that that doesn't make any sense, because when you saw me, I'd been clinging to my camera like it was a literal part of me. The truth is, I took it with me everywhere because I hoped that one day, I would find something that would inspire me to take another photo. It never happened. Until you.
    When I met you, that's when I truly understood why a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are moments. They're memories. They're maps. They don't change, even when everything else does. They're proof that everything was perfect, even just for a second. They're proof that you've had something or someone to love, something or someone to make you feel something, anything. They are time travel. They are beauty in the purest form.
    When my mom died, I put that camera away. I shoved it in a shoe box and banished it beneath my bed, intending to never touch it again. For some stupid reason I thought that maybe it was my fault, because I took her photo, and she died right afterward. I thought that maybe anything I took a photo of, it would die. It didn't take me long to outgrow that, because it was just plain stupid, but something in the back of my head always kept me afraid. A couple years after her death, I took the camera out from underneath the bed. I tried to take a photo of something, of anything, even just a dirty pair of shoes, but I couldn't get myself to do it. I would start to sweat, and I would feel the panic in my chest. But I would still take it with me everywhere, relentlessly, because I knew that's what she would've wanted. She wanted to expose me to the beauty of the world, and of photographs.
    Maybe I'd just never found something beautiful enough to take away that fear, until you. Looking back now, it sounds really creepy. I mean, who takes a photo of a sleeping stranger? But from the first moment I saw you, we didn't feel like strangers. I felt like I knew you. And by the end of the night I was certain that I did, somehow. Maybe in some other life. Or maybe my soul knew it. I took the photo because I wanted to remember what it felt like to see something so pure and beautiful, up close. I'm so glad that we didn't stay strangers. I'm so glad that you found me, all those years ago.
    But you already know all of this, don't you? Because, as my mother liked to say...
    A picture is worth a thousand words.
    Love, Isaac.

When I'm away, I will remember how you kissed me
Under the lamp-post back on Sixth Street
Hearing you whisper through the phone
Wait for me to come home
- Ed Sheeran, 'Photograph'