𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐫. ⁽⁽⁽ᵐᵃᵗᵗʸ ʰᵉᵃˡʸ⁾⁾⁾

in that moment, you transcended.

He was very tall, with long hair to his shoulders, like a girl's messy French bob. I've always enjoyed feminine qualities in men. Plus, Joel wasn't an attention seeker in the way that I used to be, but a quiet presence in every workshop and in the studio each time I went in. Something about his company made me reign myself in, the idiotic things that would come out of my mouth when I didn't think twice; he made me want to consider every part of my output with the same slow, careful ruminations. His work spoke for itself in those early days: haunting images from his childhood home, his grandmother's gnarled, arthritic hands, vulnerable portraits of his father looking like a startled deer in his potting shed. Joel liked to photograph the personal, his photos almost uncomfortably close and intimate. I enjoyed photographing the anonymous, by that time having moved past my teenage fixations on romanticising girlhood. I always tried to find humour in my images. Joel seemed to find pain in his.

Come to my housemate's party tonight, he said. We've got a blow-up pool. It was a July heatwave, the summer months when college was closed and everyone was either fighting it out over internships or resorting to barista training. My own hours and days were irregular, depending on Phil's schedule; he gave me a job helping to develop other people's photos, took me to openings, introduced me to the right sort of people. But the day Joel invited me was a quiet Thursday, and in response, I said yes.

The party was very strange, a hazy wonderland inside a run-down Victorian villa, with holes in the wall and threadbare carpets. I took mushrooms, which kicked in soon after I arrived, and set about making friends with the mix of people in the garden. Joel appeared at last, a bottle of brandy in his hand, and for the next few hours, I was entirely absorbed in his company and his thoughtful conversation. He was gentle, but quite serious - in hindsight, far too self-serious, in the way that young, white, male art students often are. I was in awe of him for a while afterwards. I introduced him to Molly, and although they were completely opposite personalities, somehow it worked. And then things became blurred.

Molly and I were on and off for a whole year, mostly due to confusion about how we felt about one another. There was real affection there, and a strong interpersonal glue holding us together, making us inseparable. But the physical side of it was a peculiar spanner in the works. So we continued to succumb to that temptation, making one another feel good, exploring our sexualities, playing at a late-adolescent relationship. But she couldn't rationalise exclusivity - after all, we weren't in love. And I found this difficult until I met Joel.

This was someone I could commit to, in the sense that I found him hypnotic, addictive and utterly fulfilling in ways I didn't even know I needed. The fact that I might have been something less to him passed me by. We formed a casual partnership in workshops, which proved fruitful creatively. Perhaps this was wishful thinking - it was certainly fruitful for him.

In my bedroom in Walthamstow, he used his phone first. Muttering something falsely profound about the way my hair tangled on the pillow, he loomed above me, the beady eye of the tiny lens peering down. And I was captured by him. It didn't take long after that for him to turn me into a regular subject, and on occasion, I expressed reservations. This isn't for this week's workshop, right? I asked him, only half joking. No, he replied, I'm just trying some new ideas out.

Molly and I spent a couple of languid afternoons with him when his housemates were in Berlin, leaving the house quiet and private. We watched Truffaut films, then Tarkovsky, then a Haneke. Building upon the strange feeling the Haneke left us with, and already a bottle of vodka down between us, Joel encouraged Molly and I, his camera clicking intermittently, all our daring laughter filling the air along with the generic incense that smoked gently in the corner, the orange, late summer light setting the room aflame.