“Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

― Homer, The Iliad

And so, a photograph, quick, to capture the exact time and place, the light exactly as it is falls, exactly where it makes the glass glint, the constellations of dust particles in mid-aerial ballet, the Eiffel Tower in the background, the gull, the plane’s ribbony trail, the exact tilt of the face, the gaze, the smile as it begins to…

Click. Too late. The photograph is blurred.

Someone, something, the earth moved and time moved on. The moment, the exact moment is gone. It was by the time we saw it, like a distant star whose light reaches earth millennia after it died.  No use in grabbing at the air; you cannot touch starlight.

Or moments. Still, both feel warm, so we map the night sky. Take photographs. Develop them. Flip through albums on bluer nights.

Paris, Jardin du Luxembourg. November 2019. One dusky kaleidoscope of captured light and colours and shapes, just at the moment when a breeze touches, lightly, infinitely, the sliver of skin over a scarf. The softness of the nape. The photograph cannot possibly smell of crisp air. It does. And the coffee warming the hand that took it. And the leaves on the ground. The texture feels like fallen leaves too, and like melancholy. The photograph feels like indigo, if indigo could be felt.

Lisbon, Tram 28. April 2018. Or was it Colombo, yellow tuk tuk, August 2017? In either, in both, a humid, fruit popsicle kind of day. The back of a cropped head, outlined in stark, orange light. Streaks of blue and green: zipping motorbikes on either side. The photograph vibrates. Jerks and lunges, slows and speeds to the pace of the song the driver sang while we held on and prayed. The photograph sounds like orange, if orange were a sound.

Glasgow, sidewalk. May 1996. Damp, it smells of earth and green, if green could be an odour. But the corners are warm and dry. Daffodils! Dabs of yellow, perfectly angled between sun and earth, the pull of liberty and roots, gravity and sunlight. If yellow were a taste, it would be French fries – coarse sea salt, piping hot – in a newspaper cone. Crisp golden crumbs at the bottom.

Rome, a Christmas. Hot chest and hazelnuts. The tingle of little bells when the film of dust is brushed off the surface. Snowdust. Pixie dust. Powdered sugar dust on hot cocoa. Animal crackers. A poem. Beirut: a nursery.  Childhood that smells of the jasmine from the window.

New York, a celebration: red traffic lights and yellow cabs. Subway fumes, pizza fumes; the greasiest, cheesiest, best I ever had. No, that was Georgetown, a Friday night. Rather: a Saturday, at around 4 a.m., followed by: Bedroom across the street. November 2010. Blue light on white walls. Black coffee. Crumbs and poetry in the sheets, IKEA sheets. Perfume, Hermès, in the pillows. The photo smells of it also.

Moments are not, cannot be captured. It is not sad; there are so many, beautiful, to be lived, and we have such brief human lives. 430 light years ago, a ray left the North Star. It reached the earth… just now. Those who looked up, just now, saw.

The rest, however, – the bookmarks, card keys, boarding passes, movie stubs, chocolate wrappers, train tickets, room service receipts for two coffees, two croissants, on a weekday – we may keep. And the photographs; emotions on 4×6,

“You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”