I remember these images in no particular order:
_the fragility of his body, the sparkling nerdiness of his glasses, or the shimmering brilliance of his palm oil complexion. I was still thinking of bodies in terms of complexion when we first met. Although America has a way of taking away one’s innocence without request, giving harmless words a concentric shell of fissionable material until they explode;
_long hugs stolen in clear view;
_a flock of birds rushing nonsensically upstream, their flight sending toads and tadpoles sinking further into the lake;
_broad and grey circles on water, the direction of the flow concealed by the low but impudent evening sunlight exciting the surface;
_chamomile tea gone cold behind closed doors.
We stood in front of the lake. We sat on a bed of grasses in front of the lake. We did not first meet at this lake even though it became our meeting spot. We were longing for each other before we met. We were looking for people who enjoyed the tingling sensation of well-constructed sentences just in the heat of an argument or the orgy of orgasm. We loved the alleged saying of Saint Augustine: Lord, make me chaste but not yet. We had read James Salter and Ondaatje; we loved how Zadie Smith could write about the unreality of time in her stories and end with an almost perfect icing on the cake of this philosophy.
We loved nature. We loved politics. We met outdoors to talk about everything and everyone. We praised and condemned Idi Amin, Nkrumah, Chernobyl, Hitler, King Leopold of Congo-Belgium, the CIA as the foremost terrorist organization in the world, Patrice Lumumba, Arafat, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Tony Blair, and Bush, George Orwell, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther without the King( the one who nailed his 95 theses to the church door). We were teetotallers who expressed the authentic anger of college students who were sex-starved, book-hungry, meritocratic, and anarchistic. We had longed for well-read friends all our lives; not just friends who could recycle the abridged versions of the Communist Manifesto or tweets from their popular celebs on Twitter, but those who questioned every idea: We argued and later came to the diplomatic juncture that ideas, even ours, should always be put on trial. We should stand our beliefs before the jury of other human reflections and ensure our ideas were not hurting someone else.
We dealt with specificities. We were suspicious of Google-search knowledge or what we berated as Wikipedia arguments. We felt hurt for the moments we were the ones peddling the wiki arguments. We pronounced “wiki” the same way priests pronounced prostitutes, without realizing that both religion and sex are forms of trade. And the suspension of one’s disbelief should not be seen as far superior to the liberation of one’s body, as a writer we both love once wrote in an essay.
We visited coffee shops, but took no pictures. We made tea. We took long walks in the woods. We baked bread right, the yeast coming out right after many attempts and a picture of the bread could have served as a memento of our triumph.
We watched the birds disappear from the lake in winter. We mourned the slow discoloration of the grasses. We braved the biting cold to measure the depth of the ice when the lake froze in December. We listened for the toads but they made no sound. We cursed when a couple of lovers desecrated the lake by walking and kissing and… on the ice. We wondered the length humans would go to satisfy dangerous desires even in the renewed heat of our sex-hunger. We still took no pictures.
We no longer visit the lake. Our hedonistic chaos for the world didn’t survive the winter. We both found a way to have sex and drain our energy for an anarchistic world. The lake is flowing again and I am here all by myself recording the return of the birds of passage. The grasses are marching back to their previous positions, away from the lake now that the water can reach their roots without them bending like those starving African children you see in pictures from Somalia begging for milk and biscuits from Oxfam. I hear his voice. His pitch-perfect sentences tell me this: “The secret to enjoying a beautiful moment is to make no duplicate of that moment.”
I had disagreed with him on this but agreed to disagree. This was the middle ground of our friendship. The urge to disagree but agree at the same time. The ability to house two contrary ideas without imploding. He believed transgression was the first duty of the imagination. Therefore we should keep no duplicates of our experiences in the form of pictures on our phones. We should enjoy the moment. Live in it and not for it.
He stopped me from taking a picture of us one sunny day. “The desire to duplicate a moment might be more a reflection of one’s own cast of mind rather than that moment worth duplicating. The whole business of trusting an image is very tricky,” he said. “Photography is like history, isn’t it? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the image in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.” I had not considered this line of thought before, so I sighed. He continued:
“An image is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the anxieties of the moment.”
In the past, I had dismissed this sort of ramblings by other friends as childish attention-seeking, but when he spoke, I saw his thoughts as an awkward search for truth.
“We need to treat a photograph’s own explanation of events with a certain skepticism. It is often the image taken with an eye to the future that is the most suspect,” he concluded.
His voice keeps coming. The concentric circles in the lake keep expanding. The birds keep exchanging duty posts on the water, flying and returning, usually in pairs. On some mornings, there is a faint indication that the lake could freeze again before summer. I took a picture of the flowing water yesterday, a piece of evidence for me that I saw the water flowing. A piece of evidence against the voices in my head telling me my friend was never real.
Chinekotam Yagazie is in his final semester of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Miami University. His thesis, A Gallery of Absence, is a vibrant portrait of absence, loss, grief, and the unreality of time. He braids these subjects through the decorous narrative lens of photography; that all-time burden of remembrance. Sometimes, his narrative bends towards the mournful silence that replaces friendships that have long passed their sell-by-date and the human incapacity to adequately fathom what once was but is no longer there. He is from Lagos, Nigeria.