a photo in words

I can't scan it so I'll say it. Maybe you'll see it for real one day. Maybe it'll just be here.

The photo is from a day on the French side of Lake Geneva this summer. On the boat on the way over a sliding door closed onto the side of my head and I had to spend a lot of time looking across the lake and biting my lip because it hurt so much I thought I would cry in front of the whole crew.

The photo was taken some time after this and the pain had died away. This is important background since I was waiting for that time when 'after pain, a formal feeling comes' as E.D. says. This photo inspires a calm and a formal feeling like nothing else but the cessation of pain or nausea.

It is blue. The lake's edge seems to curve as if it is the whole horizon. The sky is a creamy blue. S and C are standing on a promontary of the wharf containing the small crisp white boats. You cannot see the boats in the frame but you can sense them. The lakewater is so clear that for as far out as you can swim you can see the bottom. You cannot see the clearness of the lakewater in the frame but you can sense it.

S and C stand on the promontary. It curves up from the bottom centre of the frame to the middle left. C stands in shadow, arm upstretched with unconscious grace to shade her eyes. You cannot see the detail of her face. S stands, hands on hips, turning to the camera with a smile. She wears a blue dress and sandals and a yellow headscarf that punctuates the scene, like a top note in perfume. The blue is the wood note and this the floral. The whole thing would smell like warm milk and salt if it smelled of anything.

Out of scene, I stood in the shade of a sail, balancing badly in my shoes. I was wearing a blue and white striped dress and had just discovered the taste of caramel and fleur-du-sel icecream. The air was the temperature of blood and the water was very cold. Soon we would cross back on the boat and picnic on French sausages and watermelons in the park near the centre for refugee studies. But for that little while they stood cupped in curves, C's arm, S's left breast, my spine as I bent to frame the shot.

I keep all three, C, S, and invisible I propped on my desk as a talisman against these grey winter walls. Against dark at four. Against rain. Against the hiss and rumble of the gas fire. The photo tells me summer is somewhere in the world, and it is good.