An Absence of Light

Trigger warning: death

For my grandmother’s birthday, I gifted her a Polaroid photo of a horseshoe crab. It had washed up on the beach earlier that day, dead but intact, its sepia shell starting to cement itself under the wet sand. I tacked the photo up on her wall, next to her framed newspaper clipping of a warehouse fire. 

“Didn’t think to bring me the real thing?” She asked, setting down her magnifying glass on top of today’s obituaries. 

“You don’t want the smell, trust me.” I laughed. “Plus, it’s the best photo from this thing.” I pulled the camera out of my tote, placing it in her lap. I had bought it the week before at a sale in front of a Victorian house, picking it out from between chipped ceramic dishes and decanters thick enough to bludgeon someone. The owner parted with it for $10, threw in a few packs of film.

“Doesn’t work great,” he had warned. “Sometimes things don’t show up like they should.” But this one time, this one horseshoe crab did. Its dark body appeared stark against the background, currents running from its tail and spines. A biological relic from a prehistoric time, unchanged for centuries, preserved in film on the wall in my grandmother’s room — which was really just a corner of a nursing home where she stalled, flirting with the idea of death each day.  

“It’s broken?” My grandmother asked, turning the camera in her hands, inspecting it. I fished some other photos from my bag, my friend from the same day. In each, the dull, gray tint of undeveloped film sat stubbornly. A burst of nothing with a soft edge, revealing waves or clouds or sand dunes behind it, but nothing in the foreground. An absence of focus, or color. Or really, an absence of light.

My grandmother fanned the photos out on the tray table in front of her. She picked up her magnifying glass and examined them, pinning each one to the table with her forefinger as she moved across them. She looked up. 

“Who is this?”

My eyes must have narrowed. 

“In the photos, who is it?” She clarified. 

“My friend, Lucia,” I started, cocking my head to the side. “But it never developed. You can’t see her. See?” I held up one of the photos, a smear of nothing, its edges starting to show a smattering of the blue towel Lucia laid on. But her angular body, her bandeau, the mess of chestnut curls around her head — they weren’t there. 

“No, my eyes aren’t what they used to be,” my grandmother said. “But she’s pretty, from what I can tell. Beautiful hair.”

My eyes flitted from the photos to her and back again. My grandmother saw enough in the photos to make out someone beneath the nothingness of the film. To see Lucia, her hair. I held up a photo to the light, trying to see what she could, but there was nothing. Was I missing what was there? Was it my mind, simply refusing to see something on film if it didn’t live up to what I saw in person? 

Back home, I placed the camera on my desk, tossing the spotty undeveloped photos beside it. I went about my week, designing digital catalogs for school supplies. It wasn’t art, not really, the title graphic designer lost all meaning for me after years in front of a screen. That was why I bought the camera in the first place, for something physical, to remove my eyes from the pixelated blue light they drowned in every day. Digital photos from phones were crisp and clear but didn’t do justice to the world around them. Their outcomes were too real, making it too easy. Their limitless storage space limited what the eyes could see. People clicked their phone’s fake shutter a million times to get their perfect shot, only for it to sit unviewed in a graveyard of other perfect photos. But the physicality of film, its finiteness, makes you appreciate the shot you took, instead of taking one good enough to appreciate. The photos aren’t perfect, which is why I loved them. Their imperfections sat on full display with a hazy, moody focus pulling you in like some invisible force. 

That is, of course, if the photos actually develop, unlike most of the ones from my new Polaroid. But not all were losses, thinking back to the ancient crab tacked to the wall of my grandmother’s room. So, there was a trick I had yet to learn, an undiscovered photographer’s hunch, waiting in darkness for me to find my way towards. It just took time, I had figured, to learn what secrets the camera held. 

A week later, that secret came spilling out. My phone buzzed, and I answered, cradling it between my shoulder and ear as I folded laundry over my bed. 

“It’s Lucia,” a friend breathed on the other end. “She died.”

“No,” I responded instinctively. “I just saw her last week, I took photos of her.” I started to my desk, to the photos, as if the blurred evidence were proof that this was all some grand mistake, a miscommunication. 

“She died today.” The sentence that sucked the air from me, lighting the outer edge of my skin on fire. “At the beach.” I pictured car wrecks, boat accidents, a mysterious illness stopping the hearts of those trudging across hot sand. “She drowned.” Suddenly I pictured Lucia, her chestnut hair swirled around her face, submerged in sandy gray water. “She got caught in a rip tide.” I saw her long arms reaching, grabbing, pulling in panic, her brown eyes wide in disbelief. Lucia’s tall frame, limp and lifeless, laid out on a beach among cracked clam shells and knots of seaweed. 

Frantic, I clamored through papers and clothes on my desk to grasp at the photos, still believing their nothingness would prove something greater. 

But when I found them, my throat tightened. What was once an absence was now full and bright. Lucia. Lucia smiling, brooding, glowing in the sun. I swiped through them like cards in a deck. I saw every detail, the grains of sand stuck to her shoulder, the slight snag of her front tooth in her smile. Her hair, her curls, fanned around her as she laid. It was all there. 

I turned to the camera, its dirty secret revealed. I imagined tearing it apart with my hands, wrenching it open from its plastic seams, cracking its frame, showering my desk with its guts of gears and plates and wires. Throwing it at the wall, the floor, stomping, kicking, spitting, biting. Screaming until it became dust on my floor, undeserving of the beauty it captured but refused to show to the world, to anyone. Except one. My grandmother.

My grandmother saw what was there when I didn’t. She saw the beauty, the person in the film,and  appreciated her when I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Me, the one so intent on preserving the physicality, was blind to something real in front of my face. I looked at the photos again. My grandmother was right. She was beautiful. Did the camera doom her, or just capture some truth, sealed into her fate from before? 

Shakily, I put the camera back in my tote. I didn’t destroy it, but I couldn’t keep it, knowing what my photos were capable of showing. Or not showing. Instead, I swung my tote into my car and headed for my grandmother’s. She would make better use of the camera than I ever could.