It's so much more final, shooting with a film camera.

I remember this, holding Chris' Nikon, as we stand on a bridge in the Franconia Notch, and I am afraid to take pictures of anything.

Each second is indispensable; each shot is final. The click imprints an image on the film and--given our recent record--it will be months before these photos are developed, before we finish this roll of film.

All the un-captured days will stack up between the ones we memorialize and those we don't. I will forget this bridge with silver-grey rails, this afternoon drive home.

I've already lost the things I wanted to imprint: the highway guardrails rusted to brick-red crisscrossing over the snow as we reentered the highway; ice cascading down the cliff faces carved through the pass; the river running beneath frozen stones and a crust of snow; the whiteness of Mount Washington when the sun strikes it.

There is also a smokestack in a valley. Between the passing pines we can only see the top of its round lip puffing away into a clear blue sky.

That's where clouds come from, I tell Chris.

You live in your own dream world, he says, smiling.

And maybe when I write, I do.

lydia "tarantino"

[This too is an ocean just discovered: the thrashing beyond the clearing, the tides of wind through oaks, a hollow wail all night.

I awake to the hollowness: this could be a river rising, this could be reservoir's flood, this could be the ocean coming--except there is no water, not even rain, only gales and dried boughs scraping against a black sky.]