capturer

She walked to the bus stop and waited. The world around her suddenly changed when she put her earphones on. The music gave her a new sense of reality and, for once, it felt like she was important, like herself again.

Sitting by the window she observed everyone on the street. People walking, eating, talking. Kids playing on the piles of the end-of-the-winter dirty snow. Seemed as she passed, their lives paused and those moments were frozen. There was no before or after. They had a few seconds to exist as she looked at them. After that…moment’s gone.

In front of the market, she got of the bus, grabbed her camera and started taking pictures of everything. Even the dirty trashcan became her subject at one point, as if she desperately looked for something. Point and shoot. Point and shoot. Point and shoot. Every picture she looked at was more of a disappointment than the last one and she only had a few more hours before noon. She rushed to the other side of the market, maybe she would find it there.

She tripped, one of her earphones flew off her ear and she fell down hard on the ground. With her arm stretched and her camera in hand, she took one last picture before she felt her earphone slide of off her ear and everything would come to an end. She glimpsed at the camera and found what she had been looking for all these years. The moment she lost. The tree where her father made her a swing with an old tire. The swing she’d spent most of her childhood. And there she was with him. Only the camera could see it.

The other earphone fell off.

The music stopped.

She closed her eyes and disappeared.