In Love with Love...

I am amazed at how photographs refuse to capture moments. Not the exact likeness of what is before the lens, but rather the moment proper. The smell of air coming in from the sea at night while the palm trees sway and listen to the hum of a city just beginning to stir. How a photograph, despite the colors, never realizes what a sunset looks like within the mountains and in the streets.

Photographs won't ever tell me exactly what it was my love said to me right before I took that picture of her in front of that ancient fountain. The photographs will never give me back the very wonder of sharing pizza with Kate as we watched a movie after a long day of drifting along the streets of Barcelona with our stomachs happily filled on pastry and Spanish coffee. Oh you photographs who have betrayed the moment- you have only served me this one purpose: to find an outline to a feeling that I have forever.

And these outlines may not mean to you what they mean to me- but I want to share them just the same. Because in these outlines you are free to color your own shades. You are free to look at these small windows of moments and imagine yourself there. Place yourself in the little sliver of life that I have captured here, and maybe one day I will write a story.

Perhaps I will call it: All the Lonely Places. I'll write about alleyways in Paris or that loop under the trees behind the Cité U. Maybe I'll tell the stories about the empty rooms before and after once more- with feeling.

Or perhaps I will title my story: Today the Sky Burned Perfect. I'll write about running along the beaches of Barcelona with the sloshing of the sea and the gradual awakening of city lights.

Better yet, I can call it: The City's I Love Once. Those will be stories about Frankfurt and Bacharach. London and Berlin. Those cities I only came to know fleetingly. They will be love stories about homes I could have had.

But best of all- I can call my story: The Months I Fell in Love Again.

But that story wouldn't be about a place at all.

Here are the Outlines to a Story.

All my pictures so far.