Through Her Lens

Rain pattered against the window pane, each drop representing the death of a cloud. Distant voices of my classmates faded into oblivion as she walked in.

I had seen her only once before, served her in fact, at the checkout of my old, dead-beat job. We exchanged the polite greetings and gratitude, my breath caught in my chest like a mouse in a trap. Her beauty was suddenly the only thing keeping the moon in orbit around the earth.

Then it happened. She smiled. She smiled and my whole life changed. I didn’t know her name or where she was from, but I knew that I would spend countless nights thinking of her. I knew that for the first time ever, I was going to fall for a girl.

She took her seat at the other side of the room and my mouth hung open. My mother always told me that I would catch flies if I did that, but I had never seen that happen to anyone.

How was she in my form room?

It took me a moment to process the fact that she now attended my sixth form. I would have to see her every day, no; I would get to see her every day. I swore to myself that every day I would get up and go to form so I could be near her, maybe one day I would even pluck up the courage to talk to her. I never did.

I learnt a lot about her in the first few weeks, starting with her name. Honestly I had never liked the name before, but it suited her so well and it soon became the nicest word my ears could hear. I had never seen her with her hair down. The straight blonde locks were forever tied back in a ponytail, so neat that my friend even complimented it once.

“How does she get it so sleek? I’m so jealous, my hair looks like a rats nest!”

I grinned flicking through my copy of ‘Streetcar Named Desire’. “It doesn’t look like a rats nest…. It’s more like Hermione Granger before the glow up!”

My “interactions” with her were limited which is why I remember almost every detail of them.

I always knew that my interest in her would not go anywhere, for a multitude of reasons.

Reason one; she was a year younger than me. I know this doesn’t seem like a big deal but my year group and her year group were in the middle of a huge rivalry. By the time I left sixth form it had escalated into a full blown war. Even talking to her would have put a target on my back the size of London.

Reason two; even if I was willing to risk angering all of my friends, I was too scared to approach her. What would I say? How would I have acted? What if she thought I was strange? It’s fair to say I’ve never been the type to initiate conversation and no matter how much I liked her, I wasn’t about to start.

Reason three; I was so far in the closet that my fear of the dark had evaporated and the door out was a mere smudge on my bleak horizon.

So I decided to admire her from afar and I was satisfied with that. Love never works out anyway, especially when you’re a teenager. I had listened to every Taylor Swift song and watched just about all of the teen dramas in existence to figure that one out.

It wasn’t until November that I would find out my favourite thing about her. It was the thing that turned my little amateur crush into something deeper and more real. She did photography.

The Remembrance Day ceremony at my school was to be held on the football pitch and she was going to take photos of the bouquets and the crowds of students and faculty members. The morning of the parade she brought her camera to form, one of those really expensive professional ones that I had always been too scared to touch in case I broke them. In the back of the room she took pictures with her friends, the flash zapping through the room at random, distracting me from the essay I needed to finish before first period. If it had been anyone else, I would have gotten annoyed, but how could I possibly be irritated by her happiness?

So as I stood on the frozen field that same morning, my hands going numb from the cold, I scoured the field ahead of me hoping to see her. I have never seen someone so in their element before. It was almost as though the camera was a part of her. It was the lungs that let her breath and the heart that beat in her chest. She had become the camera.

The head teacher’s voice travelled to me through the wind and I gripped my hat to keep it from flying off my head. Unlike her, I didn’t have perfect hair that obeyed my hairbrush and straightening iron, so most of the time I had to keep it covered.

“You are dismissed, starting with sixth form!”

I took one last glance at her and her camera, wondering what it would be like to see things through her eyes. Did she look in the mirror and see what I saw? Did she see a beautiful girl full of so much life and passion, with dreams so beyond her imagination that she was even more determined to find her happily ever after?

I hope that is what she found when she looked at her reflection.

After that I rarely saw her. With so much school work and a job stealing my weekends, I was up so late most nights that I slept straight through form and sometimes even first period. Besides seeing her in the hallways every now and then and once when I was waiting for the bus, it was like she had dropped off the face of the earth.

Until one day in the summer when I was walking home from my best friend’s house, sporting my brand new t-shirt that said Pride on the front. The road was swarming with cars and I was doing my best to avoid looking at any of them as they went past. It’s safe to say I was failing miserably, but it wasn’t all bad because I ended up seeing her, in the passenger seat of a car. And for the second time ever, she smiled at me.

That was the last time I saw her.