Chapter Text
A/N - This is the first time I'm writing something that isn't a hopeless love letter to someone who'll never read it. I would prefer if this doesn't go the same way. I don't know how long this story is going to be, so think of this as a journey you and I are embarking on. Maybe it'll be a long one, maybe it'll end in a week. I hope it ends up being a memorable one, though. Have fun reading my attempt at being more than I'm meant to be, I suppose.
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What is a lens? The old weathered dictionary I found in the abandoned ruins of a demolished library defines it as a "piece of glass, or other transparent materials with two curved surfaces serving to cause regular convergence or divergence of the rays of light passing through it". It didn't mean much to me then. Then is not now. Now, it means substantially more to me than I ever thought it could when I tore that very same dictionary apart and used its inky pages as kindling for a fire. Warmth seemed more important than big words on yellowed paper to a child on the streets.
The fact is, I never forgot it. An oddly commonplace word to remember, I know, but it stuck with me. Memories change as time passes and as the person carrying them changes. A person's experiences reshape and add further layers to every memory, moulding it to fit their own narratives. Five years down the line, as I bought my very first apartment, all I remembered of the phrase was "glass causing convergence or divergence of light". I pitied lenses. God knows I still do, ironically enough. All it served to do was to pull together or tear apart energy that was already conceptually beautiful on its own, a thankless and invisible middleman that left no real mark of its existence save for the distortions it left behind. Such thoughts are often ruminated whilst drunk in a bathtub in a lonely house in a dark world.
When was it that I made the connections? Perhaps it was when I first made eye contact. She was beautiful if beauty meant ethereally, provokingly evocative. Or perhaps, it was when I first held her hand, gentle, tentative brushes of our fingertips as we allowed ourselves the luxury of nervous contemplation of the possibility of our being something more. Perhaps, it was none of these and it all started the day my mother birthed a daughter she didn't really want but could not refuse. Perhaps, every moment we ever live is left behind to rot and fester until it becomes the darkness that engulfs us as we suffocate from everything we have not yet lived to see. Who knows, truly? It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, as they say. But as I sit here in the center of the grand scheme of things, everything matters. Everything from a fallen strand of hair on a cold linoleum floor to a failed nuclear explosion. Perspective is what matters the most. To some, a rose may be a symbol of love and secrecy, and to others, a sign that they may have to awkwardly stifle a sneeze in a silent room. A lens may mean nothing to you as you read this pleonastic account of what I think of them. However, a lens means the world to me. It is my beginning, my end and everything in between.
She was the first ray of light I met. As I perused a meaningless college essay in a run down bakery, being slowly lulled by the smell of a fresh batch of cookies and the ceaseless chatter of people leading lives so separate from each other passing by as white noise. The warm toast on a small ceramic plate next to my books lay untouched, its sweet scent wafting toward me and acting as a sedative as I began to close my eyes. But just as I did, one voice cut through the clamour and chaos, louder than any child's cry yet more melodic than the gentle violin playing faintly on the bakery's staticky radio. My eyes snapped open faster than a mirror shattering under a hammer as I turned. Her fingers beat a rhythm only she could hear onto the counter she lay her hand on as she awaited her order. The bright sunlight from the windows filtering through her hair blinded me momentarily before clearing. Our eyes met and her finger paused its drumming, and I knew what it was, that instinctual feeling I thought I would never experience, so I smiled at her.
We introduced ourselves and she spoke to me with that voice of hers that nearly brought me to my knees. We talked and talked until the day ended with my first kiss, clumsy and quick behind a hidden alleyway that smelled of damp, dead flowers. It was as beautiful as her, the dying sunlight pouring out through the few gaps between us as we stumbled through streets we barely knew, revelling in each other as the warmth from half-opened windows seeped into our cold bones in those cold October evenings. We bathed in sunset glows, laughing through moonlit nights and waking up tangled in each other each morning. My lonely apartment seemed to teem with life and I even considered moving into a bigger one to keep it all in. I should've noticed when she reacted dubiously, saying it would be better to wait. I didn't let it deter me. We had the same favourite fruits and the same hobbies, sat the same uncomfortable way and chewed on our pencils when we found something confusing—what could go wrong?
Yet by the second year, it all went irreversibly wrong. It was the year she left. I watched her that sorrowful night that began with an uncharacteristic summer storm, the air thick with sobs and books hurled across rooms and pleas to leave the other alone and prayers whispered into deaf ears. The sounds of distant traffic outside her closed window were drowned out as she shouted until her throat was raw and her voice, her right to divinity that enthralled me only a year ago, no longer sounded the same. The last I saw of her was a fractured version of the beautiful woman I loved pacing around the messy floor of her usually spotless room as she grasped for feelings she knew no longer existed within her. I would've begged to try again, to heal together, if only I could figure out how. Instead, I left, numb and drunken on my first heartbreak. All that remained of her was the lingering whisper of her voice from that first day slowly fading from my mind like the refracted light of sun through rain and the echoes of bells that would never ring for us.