The Photographer

Chapter 1

Monday, December 5, 2011
Toronto, Canada

Vanessa Beckett stumbled around her one bedroom apartment frantically as she searched for something to wear to work. Her bedroom was in complete disarray as she carelessly tossed around clothes, coats, and shoes in search of her favorite pair of khaki skinny jeans.

"They're here somewhere," she mumbled to herself as she continued her search through boxes of clothes scattered about on her floor.

She was already ten minutes late to work with no hopes of finding the skinny legged pants. As if the morning couldn't get any worse, she suddenly tripped over one of her packing boxes and fell to the floor with a loud thud.

"I hate Mondays," she mumbled with her face crammed in a pile of her own clothes.

She sat up and began hastily tossing the clothes back in its box while mumbling gibberish about her already rough morning. Just as she was about to give up and settle for a pair of black jeans lying a few feet away, her eyes caught sight of the khakis just as she threw the last of her clothes back into the cardboard packaging box. She grinned joyfully while snatching the pants from the floor and- without giving the remaining of her scattered clothes much thought-she stood up and began putting on the slightly wrinkled jeans.

In the middle of her trying to smooth out the wrinkles in one leg, her phone rang and she clumsily hopped around the room, to her dresser, where her phone lay.

"Good morning mom." Vanessa spoke breathily into the phone.

She balanced the phone between her ear and shoulder as she leaned against the dresser to put her left leg in the pants.

"Ness, what's wrong?" Her mother asked in response to her daughter's erratic morning greeting.

"Nothing mom. I'm late for work." Vanessa explained while buttoning her pants.

She began searching for a top to wear as she listened to her mother lightly berating her for choosing to work at a simple fast food restaurant instead of a prestigious law firm like her parents had planned.

"Mom we've had this conversation a million times and my answer will always remain the same. Being a lawyer was never my dream. I want to be a photographer," Vanessa tried explaining for the thousandth time. "Working at the diner is only temporary."

Just like every other time her mother had discussed Vanessa's career plans with her, it ended the same way: with Vanessa's wants going in one ear and out the other and her mother pressuring her to go back to school to study law.

Vanessa rolled her eyes as she put her mother on speaker and slipped on a black and white sweater she had found on the floor from the leftover clothes pile-over her thin strapped tank top.

"Vanessa your father and I worked too hard for you to throw your life away to something so unpromising as being a-a ... photographer," her mother said distastefully. She spoke with so much venom it almost made Vanessa flinch.

"I'm not throwing my life away, mom." Vanessa retorted softly.

She sat and pulled her black, lace-up combat boots from under the bed and began putting them on.

"Why couldn't you go to medical school like Ava or be more like Aaliyah, who is studying to become a computer engineer," her mother rambled on, comparing her to her cousins.

Vanessa sighed as she stood from her bed and grabbed a random scarf to go around her neck. Her mother would never accept that she had a passion for taking pictures. She would never understand the beauty of capturing a particular moment that one would never be able to physically relive, in a single photo.