Her face falls slightly. “Oh. Okay. Just figured I’d ask.”
Well, now I feel like a terrible person. “Want to do something after Shabbos instead?” I offer, hoping it doesn’t sound too much like a consolation prize. “It’s just, I’m not really…I’m not shomer Shabbos anymore.”
“You don’t have to observe the laws of Shabbat to come to a dinner with me,” Michal points out. “We’d be happy to have you tonight, even if you spend the whole evening turning light switches on and off.”
I can’t help but smile a little. Lots of things are not allowed on the Sabbath—anything that might pass aswork,which includes stuff like turning the lights on or off. Because something something do-not-kindle-a-flame something. It made sense to me once upon a time.
“I know,” I say. “But…it’s a long story, okay? It’s just not my scene right now. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hang out.”
Shabbos used to be my favorite holiday. Lucky for me, since it happened every week. But for the past— God, has it really been eight years? For the past eight years, it’s just been another Saturday.
“I get it,” Michal says. “No worries. We have a space for you if you ever change your mind.”
She smiles at me as she gets up and heads for the door, but a part of me can’t help feeling sad now, like I’ve disappointed her or something.
Maybe I should have said yes. She isn’t Chaya, no matter how much she reminds me of my former best friend. Chaya would have kept prodding until I surrendered. Chaya would have shown up on my doorstep right before sunset with a bottle of vodka and a bag of molly hidden in her school satchel.
I thought I was doing better. I wasn’t seeing Chaya around every corner anymore. But maybe that was an artifact of living inLA, where the sunlight could blot out every shadow. In perpetual summer, Chaya’s ghost had nowhere to hide.
The halls are half-empty by the time I finally make it out of the classroom, almost everyone in their next class or out to grab a bite with friends. A few still linger, crouched against the walls poring over their portfolios or gathered in small knots laughing and trading phone numbers.
It takes me a moment to spot him, but I do.
Wyatt leans against a doorframe halfway down the corridor, deep in conversation with another student. I hesitate, but he’s between me and the exit. My choices are either to walk past him or to turn around and hide in Zhu’s classroom for however long it takes before Wyatt fucks off.
I choose option A because I refuse to stoop to option B’s level.
He catches my eye as I go past, and my heart stammers, my skin prickly and hyperaware of the way my shirt fabric rubs against it, like every part of me has just been powered on.
There’s this thing your brain does when you’re super anxious where itshuts offfor a little while to protect you. I read about it online. You stop encoding memories for a few minutes, and everything’s a sear of white noise, and then—once the moment’s passed—it all goes back to normal. The feeling reminds me a little of getting high: that moment right after you take the hit or push down the plunger of a needle. The way your mind fogs up like a cold window. My ears used to pop, even.
Well, that’s what it’s like for those five seconds as I walk by Wyatt. Once I’m at the other end of the hall, I don’t even remember how I got there. My brain simply did not record it.
I glance back at him, which would have been a mistake if he’d done the same thing—although something like that would be perfect in a romantic comedy. He’s still talking to the other student. All I can see is the back of his head and the way his starched white shirt strains between his shoulder blades.
I barely know the man. One fabulous night doesn’t really count. Nor does obsessing over his body of artistic work for like five years.
Stop. Being. Pathetic. Telling myself that doesn’t really make a difference. But at least I’m not indulging this nonsense.
¦
I leave Wyatt and his sexy shoulders in the hall and head to the darkroom.
The darkroom is what I used to imagine the Christian hell looked like, informed by all the horror movies I binged on after leaving New York. Even the slightest amount of natural light will ruin film development, so the darkroom is illuminated in red. The few other students working in here are dark silhouettes moving from the wet side of the room to the dry, lovingly pinning their work on the clothesline that spans the length of the room.
It’s quiet, though, which I like. There’s no rule against speaking in the darkroom, but despite the hell similarities, something about it feels holy—meditative. People who do need to talk do it in murmurs, heads bent close together, like they’re whispering a prayer.
I spent Tuesday developing the negatives I’d shot on Monday for my Printing Techniques class. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with analog film. But I like the ritual of it: Clipping the negatives. The circulation of fluids through the tank—developer, stop bath, fixer. Rinse. Dry—the strips of negatives hanging like ribbons in open air. I left them here and retrieved them this morning to examine on the light table, hunched over a loupe and drowning in shifting color.
That leaves me with five photos that I actually want to print. Sometimes what looks good in negative doesn’t hold up in full size, but I can always go back to the negatives if I change my mind.
Working with film is one of my all-time favorite things. It’sso…physical,so profane. I like the way the negatives feel between my fingers, delicate as glass. The smell of chemicals. Maybe it’s the ex-Orthodox in me, still addicted to the art of ritual.
I slide the first negative into the carrier and adjust the height of the enlarger, refocusing the image bit by bit until it takes clear and bright shape on the baseboard. The assignment is to work with still life; I took photos of some of Diego’s cooking process as he made a truly glorious quiche for us Monday night. The assignment doubled as a symbiotic favor because Diego was in the market for a new food photographer for his hobby recipe blog, and I was in need of both food and subject matter.
Most of the shots I wanted were way more abstract than the kinds of things Diego would want on his blog. I ended up taking process and finished product photos on my DSLR so I could edit them in Lightroom more easily. The film photos were first, when the raw ingredients were still loose on the butcher-block counter, me hunched over Diego’s work space snapping pictures as he ran a constant commentary behind me:Why are you taking a picture of that? Why would anyone be interested in that? It’s called tarragon and it tastes like God’s backyard grass clippings.
The first image is zoomed in close: scattered herbs and spices, the swollen yellow belly of a lemon. The blade of Diego’s chef’s knife is visible at the very edge of the frame, a patient threat. I turn down the brightness until it’s slightly too dim and run my test strips. This is the step I’m always tempted to skip—after so many years, I have a pretty good sense of what exposure time will work best for a given picture. But I’ve been wrong before, and I like to have good habits. So I do it anyway.
