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:Click: Sleeping. Soft brown hair draped like a waterfall across her arms. Such focus on the huge book she slept on. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, her arms cradling her big eyes, generous mouth, like a mothers hands on a babies feet.
:Click: Running. She loved to run. But not to win. She’d hang back, a close second, a tiny smile glittering her lips. Dancing feet, clothed in awkward manufactured shoes, slim body in awkward manufactured clothes, hair bound up in awkward manufactured highlights. I let her smile. I smiled back. Everytime.
:Click: Crying. Why? She was so sad. Her head was bowed, hair draped across the tiny body in her gentle arms like a burial cloth. Her hands are stroking the rough fur, cleaning the glistening wet mixed with the electric tears, the clinging mud, the shreds of leaves. Limp paws, supported, oh so carefully against the pull of a merciless gravity.
:Click: Sitting. She loved that chair. Claimed she could write anything in it. And she did. Genres never caught her in their carefully defined web. She was a thing of her own, of beauty, of personified words. They just came to her, she would bend over her barely lined notebook and sketch out her squiggle of ideas in ink or pen or marker, or once, yes, blood. Nothing stopped her. This time she is surrounded by her scraps of napkins, tree bark, clothing, books, backs of pictures, photos of peoples hands or back or arms, all with writing on them, ideas, snippets of conversations, lists of names. Anything. And everything. She could think of.
:Click: Laughing. She never laughed. Smiled yes, but laughed, I amend to hardly ever. Teeth white, lips spread, tongue red, face stretched. Head thrown back, hands hugging her middle, stomach flexed. Ankles still crossed. Her ankles were always crossed it seemed. Even when she stood.
:Click: Wet. Why she went out into the rain, I will never know. It was summer, the rain was gentle and hard in turns, like that one classic metaphor. Warm, and wet, and satisfying. She had whirled out of her room and out the door like a terrier and spun in the yard like a spiraling leaf. Head down, head up, arms out, arms down, dancing, swaying, kicking, giggling. She moved, she froze. Back to me, face to me, side, head. She came in with this little smile, I loved. She tossed her wet tresses over her slick shoulder and shrugged at my unspokenly raised eyebrow. That small smile flickered on and off like an idea you can’t quite remember, then stayed, almost forced, and she had started to shiver. I didn’t bother with a towel.
:Click: Pain. Written in the small lines of her shadowed skin. Fingers caught in midtremble, legs spread, bracing, arms set carefully against it all, head bowed, back bent, the weight of the world. I could, would, reach out, but never touch.
:Click: Listening. The ghost of music echoes to me, from across the years. Face set in utter concentration, she fiddled with the little knob, turning it this way and that, trying so hard to tune in that one song before it faded into memory. Silly tunes, slight tunes, sad tunes. All of them. Compiled into her graceful hands and skinny little arms. All of them in the lines of her face and the curve of her ankles.
:Click: Skipping. Arms swinging, bag bouncing, hair tripping. Feet dancing. So many of her idiosynchrocies captured in a few words, but expressed only in fleeting thoughts and brief pictures. Perfect light on her muted clothes, against her bright hair, her shining skin. Her brief hops, her splayed posture and teasing gestures.
:Click: Angry. Slammed doors, clipped words, doom. Pulsing, like an erratic heartbeat stolen from a storybook, faltering in rage and desperate for air. Clinging. Guilt. Wild gesticulating, stomping feet, pout. Taught. Tears. Tears from a long day, a short day, all bunched into a tight little madness that accused the world and requested warmth and hugs. I couldn’t give her either. But I could watch. Always.
:Click: Falling. She was always falling, falling out of my pictures, to be spared, tripping on air, on stairs, on people, on cats. Always falling against men, women, cars, trees, me, the ground. The cause of scraps, bruises, cuts, hurts, tears, so many things that had so many causes and so many results.
:Click: Her arm. A short wave as she leaves. A glimpse against the astonishing yellow of the taxi. You can see the taxi. Its curves. Its dents. Its tarnish. Its superlatives. Its creaks and groans. Its complaints. It will cradle her like a good book, used and beaten, but there. Like always. Like a capitol letter at the beginning of a sentence. Or a punctuation at the end. Or the obscurity of a poem. Or the pain of a slap. Always there, like a dead dog, in the back of your mind, a threat, a promise, a kiss. Always there like that annoying buzz behind the words and tunes on that crappy radio in the garage. Always there that the linger of her embrace, her accusations that are stingingly true, the missed touches, the promised madness, the promised feelings. Always there like those god-awful CDs you don’t ever remember buying but randomly appear in your apartment like a fungus. There, like your lucky pen you lose just before an important meeting, or your lucky shoes, you can’t find for that one basketball game, or that one word you can never spell correctly. Ever. And always.

:Click: No more film. No more pictures. Not for me. Not for her. All that is left, is pictures. For me anyway. I don’t know what she has left. Maybe she has that taxi.
:Click: Or that puppy I bought her.
:Click: Or that shot I sent, of us at someone else’s wedding.
:Click: Or that dress she used to go dancing in. The same one. It was red. Good for her hair.
:Click: Or that book she wrote. And published, so proud of her, after all these years.
:Click: :Click: :Click: :Click: God, I don’t know what she has. I never did, I tried, but it never worked. What can I say? Cameras capture all, but never tell. Like poems. Or women. Or rapists.
Want an ending? Open the camera. Do it. And develop the film. That’s right. That’s your ending.