Artistic Adams #1

Her nose started bleeding and I still can’t remember if it was from the change in the air or how Shades cast her aside. It was almost midnight when we traipsed through camp to the nurses’ cabin, our home for the weekend. Surrounded by band-aids and gauze, we mended one another’s souls.

I only spent three weekends of my life on that mountainside. All of them were within my freshman year in high school, when I was young and stupid. Before I left for the first camp, I begged my parents for a brand new Advantix camera, the cutting edge technology that allowed the casual photographer to look professional. It had three different picture sizes that gave me the power to be creative and artistic. I must have taken hundreds of photos of the people and scenery.

We sat on the edge of the cliff smoking the joint she’d hidden in her bag. The air was crisp and clean and I watched the smoke billow off over the trees and landscape. “Him and his hand rolled cigarettes. Ever so cool with his duct-tape-dreadlock hair. And those fucking sunglasses.” She was perfectly broken. The way I’d always dreamed of being. And he was beautiful, like some carefully crafted, impeccably witty, indie movie character. The dashing reject whose carefree attitude challenges women to make him care. They were perfect together and yet beautifully melancholy apart.

There we sat until a fog rose over the trees to signal fresh morning dew. We spent the entire night talking and have been ever since. As the sun began to peek his head, we knew it wouldn’t be long until fellow campers would be making their way toward breakfast. We took deep, last minute breaths of the fresh morning air, and as we turned to leave, I felt my camera in my pocket. I whipped around and snapped a quick landscape in an attempt to encapsulate that moment.

It’s the only photograph that survived from that weekend. I never blew it up or framed it like I’d promised myself. She and I are still friends, though neither of us is any more than a shadow of who we were then. While we’ve never been able to be constant friends, she makes special guest appearances at all of the major turning points in my life: losing my virginity, falling in love, losing love, marriage, childbirth.

I stand in the window, waving away the mini van. Packed with my daughter and her friends, they’re off to camp for the very first time. The van pulls away out of sight and I retire to my bedroom. Digging deep, I remove an old shoebox from beneath old stacks of Christmas wrapping paper. In it, I find the photograph from the cliff and dial her number.

“Liz?” I cry. “He’s Gone.”