STEVEN MUIR

To be fair I rarely make you coffee even when we are in the same town, because we like to go out for coffee. We go out and I read to you, or we go out and play scrabble too much, or we go out and try to do our studying. You are full of desire, for someone who’s got no interest in sex. Desire to tug at my hair, to talk until 2am, to see me in your clothes.

    We joke about a marriage of convenience (and at this point better yet, a marriage of fantasy; because your suicidal ass is going to see that day) at least once a week. It’s not like we’ll never see anyone else; there’s lots of needs the other person can’t fill up and lots of coffee cups we want to empty while holding other hands. I’ll marry you for your German citizenship - if they make same-sex marriage legal there in five years, or if only one of us does the paperwork to get “male” on our license - and you’ll marry me for my good cooking. I would like to imagine it’s because of how cute I look in a floral apron, but it’s probably the food.

But I cannot send you dinners nor breakfasts in the mail, and (foregoing puns on what good chemistry we have) I’m content to send you prints instead. A testament to when I was within focusing distance of you, but more importantly to the three hours I spent in the darkroom with it while you were over 400 miles away. For my intimacy with you (when you are with me) is undocumentable to myself.

It is not as though I worship in a chapel of captured light, you as some fragile deity of the best refractions, reprints of your hands from every angle making up my stained glass windows. No. It is not that I am a powerful deity either, creating the refractions and bits I want of you continually, until you are light through lenses and chemical reactions on fibers. But I was a dancer before I was a photographer, and it is in the motion and duration that I can best explain. Someday I will give you a home filled with light (or maybe you will give it to me, I am self-deprecating enough to warn you often that marrying an artist might lead to you paying the bills). Light through windows, light to grow houseplants, light filling jars of honey to a more golden color, light across pillows. Architecture made for photographing inside, architecture made for you because it is like you.

And do I still photograph you every morning I see you if every morning I see you is just that, every morning? And does it matter that the only prints I lay next to these are self-portraits, growing steadily in number, my face and manner changing constantly and yours in leaps when you are close to my camera again, and again months later? And then is it a documentation -  a documentation of two boys hitting puberty after they turn eighteen, lots left to change. It’s not as though I sear your heart onto my film, I am capturing nothing more than light (foregoing pun on how you light up my life). But with you there is permission for capturing outsides, beautiful things without a grander message to anyone else. I have floundered - and am still floundering - through enough conceptual projects that pictures of you can be pretty and nothing else; handsome and not otherwise. I have found myself being touched by enough cold hands that I can allow your warm ones to be warm and nothing else. You are the flowers I let myself photograph.