Capture

“I find myself developing into a strange character,” he says. No time for a reply as I alt-tab back to the chaotic spreadsheets. I’m at work, and some discretion is required.

The next time I look, Jai’s written that his lifestyle doesn’t accommodate romantic relationships with women very well. The process of establishing one seems to be marred by some overwrought inquest involving the psychological equivalent of three levels of government and two polar opposite parties, as he words it. I raise an eyebrow, but read on.

“I used to be content,” he wryly notes. “But now I’m lost and the only inkling of love I can feel is when I look at pictures of supercars.” I smile, but I sense yearning.

This reply deserves some thought. I pull back from the keyboard for a moment. The admission seems so out of character for Jai: hadn’t he once referred to the “fantasy of love” as nothing more than a biochemical reaction? And hadn’t his self-diagnosis concluded that the problem was a lack of control over emotions?

I pull up an early email, exchanged before his life was inundated by the pursuit of a third degree (not that he’d caught the first two). Photography, I recall.

Hmm. I see how he’s got here. His characterization of love at that time was that, having exercised his vaunted control, he had forgotten what it felt like. Nostalgia, then? My own definitions are subject to the same ebb and flow. In the end, I realize there’s really not much I can say.

At least, not in seriousness.

So I tell him that the emails in my inbox say that a bigger penis will solve all his problems, and offer to forward them along. He laughs, is content to indulge, to vent, with nothing in return.

It’s only later that evening, looking again over the early emails, I realize — with some surprise — that I miss him. Jai was the first one to hear about Khui — then my delicious, dirty secret. His ever-appropriate response: “Wait, so I knew you when you were a virgin?” We’d subsequently tumbled into a little fuck buddy play (which had set my relationship with Khui on fire) before he left for Australia with his beloved camera. He still pops online every now and then, but it’s usually brief. But sometimes, not: life, love, composition, nudity, fucking and evolutionary imperatives.

It must have been all that that brought him to mind while I was in Tuscany. I was lacking inspiration and my camera only seemed to frame clichés. I wanted to find something else, something that reflected not just the place, but who I was in that place, who I wanted to be among its piazzas and villas and vineyards and cheesemakers. I wanted to be so much more than a scribe.

And then I realized it had nothing to do with Italy. Anywhere, everywhere, I wanted to be more than a scribe. I wanted to be stretched, pulled, coloured. I wanted to be skin and eyes and teeth, the merciless arch of a back, predatorial hair — something savage, vicious, provoked. I wanted to be more than a tidily-composed snapshot. And I wanted someone to capture that.

Jai’s had me just this way. Untidy. Savage. Stretched. I remember his rawness in bed, but even more so how we just walked away. I miss that delectable taste of freedom. To play with fire without fear of being welded to him in the aftermath. Implicitly, I trust his ability to capture me and to let me go.

While we throw out a few ideas, he finds an old picture — one I’d taken for Khui. Standing before a window, tidily composed, ironically. But taking it had been turmoil — and he seems to understand that.

There is an appreciative pause in his typing. December, he promises. “I need to have more fun with my photography.”