Your camera

I was using Stevie camera today. If she was here in her body she wouldn't let me touch it. She saved and saved for that camera and it was expensive. I tried to use it after she got it and we got in a huge fight. I called her a stingy little brat. She told me to buy my own. We were mad at each other until the next morning and it was forgotten.

One day I was in her room with her, she was reading all about the eight million features the camera had and slowly going through every single page of the four hundred page manual. I picked up the camera and started taking pictures of her. She looked so pretty and I wanted her to see herself in that moment, I wanted her to know how I see her. Instead of getting mad at me we tried a couple of the features like sepia, macro and slow shutter speeds. I had no idea that those were the last pictures I would have of her. I enlarged a couple of them for her funeral and I printed one on balloons for her memorial. She was wearing her favorite teal t-shirt, the one I wear now, it is so soft, just like her. I found them saved on the computer, she saved them all it broke my heart.

So I have been using her camera at first I asked permission soon I just used it as if it were mine. It started going nuts taking only five photos on four batteries. I finally ordered an adapter for it. I got it in the mail a couple days ago and decided to photograph the Halloween figurines with it.

All was going great for about five minutes then it started shutting off over and over like it did when I used the batteries. It finally hit me that maybe she was trying to get my attention. I said out loud, "Stevie is that you?" I then told her that I was sorry I was using the camera but she couldn't use it anymore and I thought it would be OK. I told her I would stop if she wanted me too. I asked one last time "Is this you?"

I shut the camera off for a few minutes and sat there thinking about her, thinking about one of my favorite books "What Dreams May Come" and how Christy keeps trying to reach his wife from the after life and instead of her being comforted by his attempts she feels pain, when he is close to her and she can feel him so strongly it hurts her, she remembers and it is too much for her to bear.

There is a part in the book where Christy is talking to a psychic that his son has brought home. His wife will not hear it, can't believe it he wants so badly for her to know he is there but she gets angry. Then there is a scene in the movie where she is on her hands and knees on a hill with a big tree, the wind is blowing and she is so sad. Christy tries one more time to reach her, he kisses her, and she can feel it but it breaks her and she screams for him to leave her alone.

In What Dreams May Come she can not be with him the way he is after he has left his body, she can't believe that he exists after and the strong sense of him magnifies the loss instead of comforting her. In the book she kills herself not to be with him but to not have to be without him.

He finds her in the hell she has made for herself and risks his soul to save her or to be with her where ever she is forever even if it is hell.

It seems like a deep thing to think about while you are sitting with a camera on your lap in the middle of the day, smiling dollies all staring at you and waiting, but I think that I sometimes refuse to believe she is with me when she is most with me. When she is most with me it hurts because it is so clear and real that everything has changed and there is nothing I can do but accept it.

I told her not to stop trying, even if I cry. I told her I will learn in time to understand that when I feel her that strongly it is because she is close and not because she is gone.

I turned the camera on and it worked fine, all day, and the photo's were beautiful.

I love you Stevie, the tears are only because I miss you so much and I am so frustrated that it is taking me so long to learn how to do this, to figure out how to be with you in this new way. Be patient with me lamb-chop, I am doing my best.