Immortal

“What I like about photographs

is that they capture a moment that’s gone

forever, impossible to reproduce.”

– Karl Lagerfeld

"And don't forget to tell yourselves that you are beautiful just the way you are, my darlings," singsonged the voice from the laptop, where a beautiful blonde YouTuber was explaining how to shape eyebrows according to your face type.

"Easy for you to say," Emma murmured, giving her left eyebrow a finishing touch.

She stepped away from the mirror in order to take a better look at the result. After a short pause, she shook her head in disappointment.

"This is a mess," Emma muttered and stomped to the bathroom, where she quickly washed off the makeup, making sure that not even a dot was left.

She raised her eyes from the sink and stared at her reflection. A tired face with big brown bags under her eyes stared back at her. Her skin was pale and thin, lips dry and chapped. Her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes seemed too big for her face. The disease had worn her out completely.

To be completely honest, the disease hadn't just exhausted her body, but her soul, too. It had stolen everything from her: her friends, her boyfriend, her job. It'd wiped out her dreams and plans; her smiles and laughs. Even her hobbies were gone. Because in the end, you always lose everything. And all that's left is you and your problems. In her case, it was her and her eternal companion – disease. It was gnawing on her, eating her up piece by piece. It seemed to Emma that her previous life had never even existed.

"You are beautiful," said Emma without even a shade of confidence. "Just the way you are." She tried to smile but couldn't. Unable to look at herself any longer, she flicked off the light switch.

She stood there for another minute – a reflection of a silhouette in the door frame. A reflection of her old self. A ghost now. A ghost of the woman she used to be: happy, fun, always ready with a joke. The soul of any company.

It was hard to be the soul of a company without one. All her friends had turned away from her. No, that’s wrong. She was the one who had slowly disappeared from their lives, and they just breathed a sigh of relief. When they had heard about her diagnosis, they’d all had the same reaction – horror and pity in their eyes. They felt sorry for her, sympathized, shook their heads in disbelief, even tried to raise some money for her treatment. But nobody had ever known what to say.

She didn't blame them. What did you say in such a situation? She didn't know either. But she'd felt that they had been uncomfortable in her presence. They were ashamed of their happy lives, plans and dreams. They felt that their problems hadn't been problems compared to hers. And she'd soon stopped asking them anything. Then she'd stopped calling them, and later, stopped texting.

Emma didn’t miss them. She had trained herself not to think about them, as the memories were more painful than her reality. The only thing she missed was her eyebrows. People looked funny without eyebrows.

Emma took another sad look at the silhouette in the mirror. There was something painfully dear about it – a wisp of the past. Some impulse made Emma run to the bedroom and grab an old camera – one thing she hasn't sold or gifted to anyone yet. She came back to the dark bathroom, adjusted aperture and ISO, set a slower shutter speed, played with white balance and took a photo. Just one picture.

She took a long pensive look at the photo. It was dark. It was slightly blurry. And it was good. Intriguing, mysterious, somber. It could have been a girl from Pinterest.

Emma switched the lights back on. No, there was no Pinterest girl, no Instagram girl, no social media girl of any kind in the mirror. There was the same sick woman with the eyes too big for her face.

Emma walked back to the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the window. In the bottom right corner of the window a Polaroid photo was glued. It showed two beautiful young people in love. They felt good together. And none of them knew that very soon a disease would come, and there would be no more good, and no more together.

Emma sighed. A thick fog was hanging outside the window. It crawled down from the hills, hugged the trees and was trying to sneak up to the windows. She loved fog. There was something mysteriously gentle about it.

Emma jumped up from the bed, pulled on her dark jeans and beige hoodie, and grabbed her camera. She tied a scarf around her head, as she had been doing for a couple of months, put on her sneakers, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her gaze lingered on the reflection. The scarf suddenly felt odd, out of place. Emma yanked the kerchief from her head. After the chemotherapy, her hair was growing back coarse and curly. Emma sniggered. She had been dreaming of curly hair since childhood. Be careful what you wish for.

She left the apartment and wandered aimlessly down the street. A wind was blowing and tiny rain drops were slapping her softly on the face, as if trying to wake her up from the lethargy: wake up wake up wake up.

Emma felt that she was finally wide awake. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, she took a deep breath and inhaled the rich scent of the fog. She watched as the fog painted the town with delicate strokes. The world was gray, but today it seemed like the most vibrant place.

Emma snapped her camera again and again, and with each “click,” she felt more and more alive. It was as if her ears had finally been unplugged, and she could hear again. Her eyes were open, and she could see. Her heart was beating, pumping blood through her once-lifeless body and making her soul feel again.

She had taken what seemed like thousands of photos by the time she finally reached a little old church that Nana had once taken her to, hoping that the granddaughter would find faith in her heart. In the soft embrace of the fog the church looked especially mystical. Emma took a picture, stood there for a while, looking at the light falling from the windows, took another picture, and decided to walk around the church. There was a graveyard behind the building. The tombstones were old, and most of them were untended.

Emma took a couple of photos. She knew that in some cultures, people carved the portraits of the deceased onto their tombstones. One day, we will all become portraits, she thought. Emma looked around once again, and returned to the entrance of the church.

"They could film a sequel to Sleepy Hollow here," she chuckled. Nana would have been terrified of such blasphemy, and the thought made her feel even lighter—like a mischievous teenager.

When Emma returned home, she felt tired – drained, even – but her mind was at peace. Tranquility spread down her limbs, having a healing effect on her soul. It was a fantastic feeling, something she hadn't experienced in a long time.

She couldn't sleep that night. Her stomach was hurting again, and at three in the morning she turned on the lights and opened her laptop. She imported all the photos she had taken during the day and started looking through them. Many were blurry. Some were grainy, and others, frankly speaking, were terrible. But when she got to the photo of the church, she paused. The photo was great. Gray and mystical, it didn't look grim. On the contrary, it seemed full of hope. Emma wasn't religious. But at that moment she thought that faith felt like this: a light from the church windows in a thick milky white, like a beacon for lost souls at sea. It made her feel that she was not the only one in that dark sea of loss and despair. It made her want to share this feeling.

Emma spent the rest of the night retouching and editing the photos, planning to upload them to some stock photography website.

In the morning, she felt tired and lost. It was raining, and she had no desire at all to go outside. She made a cup of lavender coffee that her mother had sent her a month ago and stood before the window. Staring intently at the raindrops on the glass, Emma took a sip. She ran her finger along the cold surface. The drop she had been watching so closely reached the bottom first. She smiled and, for the first time in a long while, started humming to herself. Recently, there had been many of those “first times in a long while.”

"I should go get the camera," thought Emma, but continued to stand there by the window, gripping her cup of coffee tightly.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the lavender scent. She felt as though she was standing in a field of lavender, with the soft raindrops gently embracing her delicate form. A warm breeze brought faint citrus notes and began weaving them into her hair. There must be a lemon tree growing somewhere nearby, she mused without a hint of surprise. A mischievous sunbeam slipped through the heavy, angry clouds and kissed her cheek. Eyes still closed, she knew a rainbow had appeared as she heard its colorful, sugary chime.

Somewhere beyond the city, thunder grumbled in discontent. She opened her eyes and took another sip of the hot lavender coffee. Slowly, she put the cup down on the table and walked to get her camera. She had to find a way to capture those incredible feelings and thoughts in a photo.

Emma found solace in photography. The photos she took smelled of lavender in her coffee and cinnamon in the apple pie from the nearest bakery; tasted of sea salt on a girl’s lips and vanilla ice cream in a child’s hand; were painted in the colors of fog and rain; and felt like hope, love, and faith.

Emma didn’t know how much longer she had left to live—whether it was five months or a lifetime. But she was certain of one thing: whenever she held her camera and pressed the shutter, she became immortal. Not because her photos would be so extraordinary that they’d be featured in National Geographic or because future generations of photographers would learn from her work, or because her images might be shown in galleries. No. It was because, when she held the camera, she stopped time. She captured color, scent, sound, and taste in a frame forever. And her feelings. Her mind and her soul would forever remain framed even after her last breath dissolved in the cold Canadian air, letting the milky fog finally catch it, and embrace it, and blend with it.