the things that wouldn't last

Outside it is snowing and the trees look like broken umbrellas and it’s that odd kind of light which looks old, somehow. And that is how I always think of the light in photographs – old – as though the light will never look that way again and that is why, here in the study I share with P, the walls are bare. I won’t have photos on the walls. I cannot think that the light will never look that way again, when I write.

D’s office wall is covered in photos of himself, his friends, family, travels. He keeps them there to remind himself of who he is, where he has come from. I would feel crowded out by them but D is a cameraman. He thinks in images. Without them he is lost.

There was a time when, feeling a little lost myself, I took to taking long walks with a borrowed camera. It didn’t matter that the resulting photos were disappointing. The motive was the seeing; the walking around and the seeing. I saw huge, spiked jackfruit in the market, a man in a wheelchair inside a van - his mobile workshop - fixing broken electrical goods, a black cab all smashed up, the underside of a tree – the leaves like washing on a line, a misplaced trolley in the park which seemed as though it were grazing. But I began to feel self-conscious with my apparatus and preferred instead to look at other people’s photographs than to take them myself. That is, until mobile phones came with mobile cameras, after which I took to taking photos constantly so that it became a kind of mania for me – photographing the things that wouldn’t last – the flowers D bought me in Tallinn and the breakfast he brought me in bed from the hotel buffet (I am a big fan of hotel buffet breakfasts – they are the height of civilization, they make me want to fall to my knees and say grace). And D being a cameraman, would also take photos most times, but sometimes, he would refuse to: I want to remember this, he’d say, putting his camera away.

And then after losing too many mobile phones and the photos I’d taken with them, and now no longer spending time with D, I seem to have lost this compulsion to photograph, and the beautiful little digital camera he bought me from Tokyo goes unused. At least it seems that way until I realise that to try to write in the way that I do is informed by as desperate an impulse to record, to frame, to remember.