THE CLOSEST WE'LL GET

This was the evening (the evening after the day spent doing this), when Dave took a single polaroid photograph of Jenn beside the water. Later after it had developed in his pocket and we went to look at it, it was just a picture of a landscape. Jenn wasn't there. I wasn't in the picture. Right where I should have been, I wasn't.Sometimes I write down words to try to describe a feeling I had, and no matter what, it falls short. It's like a lightning bug that I want to bottle up to show you and to look at for the rest of time, but it gets away. I feel like the best I can do is try to write about it as soon as I can, that this way I can somehow better capture it, that my mind is still holding on to it and I can still feel the wisps of the feeling before it vanishes. Like waking up from a dream you don't want to forget, but the minute you're out of your sleepy haze, the details have gone and the feelings aren't describable. Some things can just be felt, in the moment, only for us to know. We look at the same picture and read the same words and yet we've both been somewhere completely different. We can write down words, or we can take a photo, and I try to do both. We do this so that we can try to feel what we felt before, so we can explain it to others. It's the closest we can get but we know we fall short but still we keep trying anyway. I keep trying to go back to these moments and to describe them or capture them. I keep falling short, but I will keep trying.The thing with writing is that there are just some moments that you can never put back into words. We try to but we know that we can't exactly feel what we felt in that moment. Going to a summer beach resort town in November felt a lot like that. You can almost hear the yells of children and seagulls, smell the sweat and sunscreen on your skin, but the sky is a different colour and the landscape's changed and you know you can't exactly put it back into words until you are there in that moment again.Grand Haven, Michigan, November 8th 2012