Camera Lucida

I am taking pictures of this boy. He is absolutelyfuckingbeautiful and is wearing only his pants tied haphazardly with a belt over baggy pale blue underwear, with failing elastic that is making the waistband fold over on his left side, accentuating his hipbone, which is facing me.

Behind him is his colonial kitchen with yellow walls and dirty dishes. My digital camera makes a loud clicking sound meant to simulate its manual counterpart. Click click click I go, while he washes a frying pan and fries bacon and prepares some weed.

Each time he stretches; skin skims over bone. And it’s as though he could rearrange his mind as easily, and then oceans, continents, language.

A natural disaster rippling quietly through him.

Meanwhile I watch him through my camera lens, safe and tired; yawning.

I can still hear Smashing Pumpkins playing in the background. And can see the inside of his room, feel the scars on my tongue from him trying to bite through it last night. I remember screaming his name as he hurt me. And his hand on my chest, mine on his, my heart skipping too many beats to be heard at all.

This dead French theorist Roland Barthes once said that photography is equivalent to death – that the photograph kills a moment – simultaneously attesting to the existence of a thing and its absolute pastness. He was writing about a photograph of his mother just after she had died. Shortly after completing the book he died too, ostensibly of a broken heart.

Click, click click.

A fake shutter that sounds like the cocking of a gun.