Three

p<>. I met Katy in a cafe in Sydney, years ago now. It was a Saturday in September, I think. She was playing wingman (or wingwoman, I guess) for a mutual friend who I found out later harboured romantic feelings for me; I was uncharacteristically hungover and not at all pleased to be out of bed.

p<>. I am quite a cynical person. I don’t really go in for Valentine’s Day, or for romantic idealism. At least, not anymore. But I can say without the tiniest sliver of doubt that I fell in love with Katy before she even opened her mouth, before our eyes met for the first time; I fell in love with her the second I saw her.

p<>. What happened in between that moment and the moment this picture was taken over four years later is a long and complicated story – too long and complicated to go into here. But as with all of the stories of the great loves and lovers that shape and change our lives, The Story of Katy and I comprises lust, passion, wonder, joy, magic, peace, care, and truth. It is also woven of loss, sadness, confusion, grief, frustration, anger, jealousy, and pain.

p<>. And in between is everything in between.

p<>. The story isn’t over. Perhaps we’ve only just reached the middle. Or perhaps we’re still at the beginning. I like the idea that a story has no truly definable end, maybe not even a truly definable starting point; that there is only and only ever has been one story, and it sweeps us all up like spores on the wind and carries us along, spiralling outwards and upwards forever, after life, after death – aimless and infinite.

p<>. But there are stories within stories – chapters, prologues, epilogues; little babushka dolls of time, any of which may hold inside them an entire ice age or the most fleeting glance from a stranger – 1/60 of a second; the speed of a camera shutter. This picture, my favourite happy accident of all the happy accidents in my lomographic footprint so far, is it’s own story: a story of two goodbyes.

p<>. The first took place years ago outside Katy’s apartment in Sydney. A couple of battered bags and boxes full of my belongings sat on the pavement at my feet, and I shouted and glared and eventually regained my composure enough to embrace her. When she turned and walked away I cried, and I stood on the footpath for half an hour before I had the presence of mind to hail a cab.

p<>. The second was last year in Melbourne (where we had rediscovered each other after a long time apart), and she was making some changes. She was leaving town, for one – putting a long and successful career as a screen actress behind her to pursue a path more noble. She’d cut her hair too. No longer the long cascading locks of a farm girl, but the elegant sureness of a young woman.

p<>. I’d offered to take her to dinner on her last night in town, and so she dropped by in the late afternoon and we sat out on the patio and talked a while like we’d done so often in the weeks before. Slowly the setting sun crept down into the alleyway around us, and I knew I had to capture the moment somehow – Katy with her new hair, her new life, in the flat I would soon be vacating in the city she was leaving in her rearview mirror the next morning.

p<>. It was going to be a perfect photo. The only camera I had on hand, though, was an SX70 I didn’t really know how to use, with one shot left in the pack. The ambient light was low, and the new Impossible films had been causing me a hell of a lot of grief, but I took up the old relic, sat on the steps above Katy, framed my shot carefully and asked her to hold still. I clicked the shutter button and waited for the electronic whir of the camera, but there was no sound. This had happened a few times and I was yet to figure out that SX70s were built with an electric eye that measures available light and adjusts the shutter speed accordingly. In frustration, thinking for sure that my shot had been ruined by a faulty machine, I shook the camera violently and even smacked the side of it with my hand. At this point the picture was ejected, and I took it dejectedly inside and put it face down on the kitchen counter.

p<>. A few minutes later I checked on the shot, and there was no real sign of any visible image developing – just a whole lot of overexposure. So I grabbed it up (along with a handful of other instants that hadn’t turned out) and threw it into my bedroom bin just before we left for dinner.

p<>. After a couple of pizzas, a glass or two of wine, and a lazy evening stroll designed to delay her inevitable departure, Katy and I returned home and once again stood entangled on the street where, this time, most of the tears were hers.

p<>. Eventually she got into her car and drove off, and I watched her taillights disappear; and I cried and stood on the street for half an hour before I had the presence of mind to go inside and climb into bed. I threw my jeans and shoes off (not in the mood to be bothered showering or changing) and glanced into my wastepaper bin to see Katy staring up at me, enshrouded in golden light and seemingly fading into the air around her. I’m still not sure how it happened – I have no idea – but it’s beautiful. Ethereal and evanescent, but captured forever in chemical emulsion on a sheet of plastic, it is the picture of a memory.

p<>. And it’s perfect.

p<>. Somewhere around the beginning of this story, or chapter, or little babushka doll of time (before Melbourne afternoons, and long goodbyes, and taxicabs, and analog cameras, and long before this rumble) there’s a heartbroken young guy sitting in a room miles from home, guitar in hand, laptop open, composing a song called My Best Accident to send to the girl he loves, because he can feel her pulling inexorably away, and he doesn’t know what else to do.

p<>. I’ve never shared that song with anyone else – I’m a terrible guitarist and not much of a songwriter; I had only very basic software at my disposal and you can hear the whir of my laptop fan the whole way through. But I’ve posted a link to it here because it just seems so remarkable that when asked to share my best accident, the story of it leads me all the way back to a song of the same name, written for the same girl who still looks up at me from this picture, shrouded in gold.

written by werriston on 2011-04-08