I don’t know how many shots I got off before I started breathing normally. Before I began to trust myself. Before I let myself enjoy directing her motions, pulling focus and snapping the shutter. 25? 50 maybe? Focus. Fire. Breathe.
It was somewhere deep in the middle of the session when I began to feel part of it. Like I belonged there. Rather than like I was fumbling around in shoes too big, equipment too heavy, eyes too unfocused. A seamless dialogue rehearsed so many times was choppy, uncertain. It showed the rustiness that comes with being out of practice. 133 days. 1/3 of a year between the last time I’ve been here and now. 12 to 16 hour, three shoot days vanished long before I expected them too. Traded for monitors and longing and the greatest fight I’ve ever witnessed. No choice but to step away from my studio when my body determined it was time for my girls to arrive and us all to firmly shift our focus.
We reopened in December with my sweet Laura doing her part and mine. A stand-in snapping away. Offering our ever so patient clients what they’d signed up. Sort of. I’ve managed business from afar. Booking clients, handling edits, shipping prints and packages since about that time but I haven’t been ready to return. I’m still not.
My desk is like a time capsule of mid October. A stationary receipt marked the day before their birthday for items I’d gathered for our babyshower. A stack of prints we’d planned to frame and hang, if only we’d had the time. My calendar on the wall still months behind. Yet there’s something foreign in it’s lack of dust. Other people have been toiling away here and I find evidence of their preference. A disk tucked beneath my monitor stand, the screen a little too far to the left. My mouse inches from the keyboard {I prefer it tucked in close}.
I trace my hands along theses artifacts and feel shivers. It’s a longing, somewhere outside of reminiscence and pain. To sit in this molded plastic chair is to be thrust back into those moments, I was so unaware of their finality. When I was here before there were two babies happy in my belly. When I was here before there was one sister gone but one strongly fighting. When I was here before we would make it to term. When I was here before we’d already been through hell but held hope. When I was here before…
The chasm between then and now spans far more than it’s days chronicle. It is two worlds bridged by a part of our story we will forever fight to erase and hold close. To be here now is to let go. To be here now is to close the door and let that live behind us. To be here now is to acknowledge all that has happened and move forward.
Readiness is fleeting but necessity steps in. Ready or not, I need to be working, creating, resuming what we abandoned so many months ago. I will stitch together the moments of the before and the in between to tuck into my pocket for the present. I will trace their jagged edges like bits of blanket long outgrown. I will find comfort in the chaos of all we have endured. Someday.
I suppose allowing myself to enjoy the art of what I do again will come with time. I felt glimpses of it yesterday that I will pair with the glow of tomorrow. And my daughter, one of my daughters, will accompany me. Distract me. Inspire me. Until we get there.