this photo smells of summer, of the sun in your hair, and the soft warmth of your skin under my fingers. it is the ocean wind, cool up in the hills, on our bodies as we speed down the deserted country roads. this photo feels like your hand stealing over mine underneath the table, with nobody knowing. it is the memory of a lunch made memorable not because of the food (which was good) but because of your leg pressed against mine. this photo fills my stomach like a lazy, languid brunch in the hazy late morning heat that burns away the stark cold of the long beautiful night. this photo sounds like a song, the one that goes "we just don't care" because we don't; because we hold hands behind them and touch each other when they're not looking and make out when their backs are turned; because these cobblestone streets are our little secret world and the corners are for us to hide behind and the crowds are for us to get lost in. this photo is about the private moments that were just for us. it is the misrepresentation that i didn't mind making about our relationship to onlookers and the image of lovers that we were. it is about your body around my cold and shaking one, warming me up, and the towel you pulled around my drenched shoulders. this photo is as grainy as the white sand that blanketed the beach in the same smooth way the sheets of the hotel room were. it is a photo that moves, from the dusty streets down the stretch of the beach through the wide open evening sky and down the back lanes into the rooms we slept in. this photo sounds like the pounding bass in the lounge and is about dancing together and running off alone through the night, and that corner off the street where nobody saw us, and the toilet you pulled me (or did i pull you?) into. it tastes like the ice cream we never had, because what we wanted was not ice cream but to be alone. this photo is about the place where we smoked all those cigarettes, just beyond the pools of light. it feels like your shoulder under my head and the roughness of your jacket. and it is about what we did after, for which there are no photos but only memories that flash through my head one after another, memories so short and blurred that they are not really even memories at all but a feeling at the back of my head. and this photo segues into this photo and this one, where we are holding hands into the last moments and don't want to let go, and then fall into memory; memories of nights and mornings, memories of windows and of mirrors and of softness and of warmth and of cold and of pillows and of need and of happiness. of you. and me.
