I used to rock this dark gray corduroy jacket that looked more like a blazer. People said it made me look chubby. That was also when I first got pristine white sneakers. And man, I went all out trying to keep 'em white. My go-to jeans were still those silicon-splattered-on-asphalt-colored wide-leg ones, you know, within reason. Still no hats, no underwear, no chains, no earrings, none of that junk. Just a watch. A pretty understated watch with a metal link band. Dark shades always hung on the collar of my light gray t-shirt. That was my look. Yeah, I had a thick, bowl-cut kind of haircut back then, hanging down to my earlobes in the back and almost to my eyebrows in the front.

The wind counted my hairs, and I counted the shots. I was scanning the scene, figuring out how much I could snag today. I hit up a few spots. First, the highway: pristine, gritty gray asphalt, stark white markings, a cozy two-lane width. It felt like I could leap, flip in the air like a ski jumper, and plunge onto the asphalt, only it wouldn't be this brutal, hard fossil. Nah, it'd be elastic, 80% cotton fabric, stretched out like a weird ribbon from one side to the other. I'd fall right into its embrace, it would give, and then gently lower me as many meters as I wanted. I'd gasp, not just from the slow, springy deceleration, but from my skin touching that fabric—I almost felt it more than saw it—and from the heavy, gravitational press of it against my back, or arms, or thighs. Soft reality. Springy reality. There it is, walk on it! Only some over-trained athlete would even think about bracing for impact in that situation.

That fabric… it was your jumper the last time we met. I swear, touching that fabric gave me as much of a thrill as touching my guitar. Or was I touching you? I don't know, when my hand grazed your shoulder, smoothing that surface with my palm and fingers, I was focused on the fabric, I think. I don't remember imagining your skin underneath. I wasn't even thinking about you. My bad.

Along the highway, I kept spotting these rock formations. Not cliffs, more like piles of rocks. Or at least, they looked like piles. Really, they were dark gray boulders, years of corrosion eating away at them, leaving deep gashes and cracks. It felt like if I just veered onto the shoulder and slammed into one of those piles, the rocks would explode, flying high into the sky, then raining down for a couple of minutes, glinting in the sun, burning perfect, smoking holes in the air. I didn't do it. My sneakers. I wasn't worried about my feet. I knew these weren't solid, splintered monoliths, but just heaps of airy, gas-light rock fragments. A feeling of crumbly reality. Fragmented reality. There it is, catch it, piece by piece! No government, not even our goddamn board of directors, could put that puzzle together!

You're made of those pieces. Every time I try to hug you, just touch you, I only touch one fragment of your body. Like it's isolated. Infinitely small. I could stir you like coals in a sack, but what would that even mean to me? I want you to be whole. It's hard to see you as a complete entity when all I can touch is this ridiculously tiny speck of you. When I try to figure you out, to grasp your motives, read your thoughts, I latch onto something, and boom—I'm holding a single atom. Literally, a negligible particle. For a collection? I can't think of you while holding one molecule from your body, one micro-quantum of your nature. I want YOU, not the scattered molecules that make you up. I want you W.H.O.L.E! Sorry.

I walked through these trenches, dug right through the woods. I kept guessing what their labyrinth could mean, how they were laid out relative to each other. I walked along the bottom of one of those ditches, and the soft, thinly grassed sand held the imprint of my soles until the next rain. The sun, sly as hell, weaved through the trees, always hitting its mark—me. It wanted to scorch my clothes, leave me naked so I could see myself. 

No, seriously, imagine this! Tall pine trunks, scattered but dense for miles, should've made the sun flicker like crazy. But the pines just stood there, and the sun shone constantly. Maybe it was a second sun, my own personal one, hovering three meters away? It was peeking at me. And I tried to picture the machine that dug these ditches. Probably a tractor ballasted with hedgehogs. They're trying to escape their net, but they keep getting distracted by their own needles. Their little paws churn like mad, not tearing the earth but erasing it, like a giant rubber. And now I was walking here, with measured steps, each one stamping a pristine tread pattern from my soles onto the bottom. I wanted to be lighter, to lose gravity. To just ditch it. I want to walk without leaving marks where I don't want to. That would be some kind of surrogate for a smooth reality. Imperturbable reality. There it is, go on, float above it, if you don't want me to find you.

How many marks have I left in you, on you, on your surface? None inside. Inside—that's where you belong only to yourself, where you can even let yourself not crumble to dust. Outside—that's where you can be reached without crossing the skin's boundaries, where love truly hides. I stood there, remembering Françoise Sagan. Yeah, that was her idea. Love is just the interaction of skin. You like Brahms? I tried to understand you by caressing you, talking to you, looking at you. I was fiercely protective of my right to secretly watch you. "Why?" you'd wonder. You don't get it. Secretly devouring you with my gaze—that's love. Love lives in hiding. Every time we met, I didn't just hug you; I pressed your body into mine. I craved fusion. Afterward, you'd examine the bruises on your skin from those hugs. I never understood how skin bruised so easily… Suppressing a gasp, you'd step aside, casually flashing your right leg, and take my arm. I left marks on you. It's hard to count the traces I left: imprints, bruises, scratches, tremors in your body from pleasure as much as from irritation, all the words you took to heart, the memory of touches, all the glances, even the movement of air. I wanted to leave a mark in you, but only in the center of your consciousness and the core of your unconscious. I wanted to be the mark of that day in you. Sorry.

I swung by some gas station. Needed food. TV was blaring in the cafe. I was on the screen. And in front of it. I ate spaghetti with asparagus, then a beet sandwich, then chocolate with rooibos – and all at once, I was walking with a camera on my shoulder, setting up a tripod, playing to the crowd: making big, showy arm movements, pointing fingers in opposite directions, zooming the lens. I'm off to the side, hunched over, glued to a piece of the video camera, an infinitely small fraction of its being. I'm from the front: a cyclops. From above: they're rolling me on aluminum rails that whine exactly like that bedside table in your bedroom. Or I'm just standing there, five legs spread wide.

My shots. My close-ups. My focus choices. My zoom levels. My commentary booming from the speakers. A hum. My order, which I rattled off like I'd spent all day crafting my menu for today. Which wasn't far from the truth. My clumsy moves, my habit of loading too much onto my fork, my off-kilter chewing. I watched outside as gas flowed into one car, then another, then a third, as new cars pulled up and drove off. I was filling up right alongside them.

I was thinking. It's easier to think about you when you're not around. When I'm not thinking about the fabric of your jumper, or a spot on your body, or the marks my fingers leave, but about Y.O.U. But in that moment… as I sucked the cold sauce off the last piece of asparagus, I looked at the screen, and I remembered—why I even came here that morning, remembered I hadn't intended to think about you. And just like that, the thought of you hit me when I was about to concern myself with totally different things. 

But I didn't get sidetracked right away. First, I managed to draw some parallels between my lunch and the cars fueling up. No, it's not about what gas is to an engine versus food to a human body. But at that moment, I felt like I was eating literally side-by-side with the cars. I felt, probably, like a pig wedged between two neighbors, eating from the same long, deep trough. Nobody else was at the tables but me. I was alone with the cars. We had lunch together, wished each other bon appétit through the greenish glass, shaded by the gas station canopy. Only I ate half a kilo of food in half an hour, and each of them guzzled fifty liters in a quick two minutes. Plus, they had people serving them, and I was self-sufficient.

Sitting in that cafe, I started processing what had happened. I contemplated my lunch with the cars until I got bored, but I managed to feel a certain closeness to them. Something akin to mutual understanding, a fraternal bond, a sense of friendly curiosity. Now I remembered why I’d taken a vacation from my whole life that day. I needed to transfer all those feelings I'd experienced towards the cars onto my own camera.

By then, I was starting to realize I was never a born cameraman. I peeked, sure, but I was no grand voyeur, no infallible genius of the light disc. Those I worked with respected me, gurus loved me, but I felt this growing pity for myself, a deepening disgust. Nobody ever complained about my footage.

Except you. And that’s what killed me.

I watched my interview on TV. Phenomenal! The cameraman in the shot. It would've been phenomenal if I were the only cameraman in the world. I fiddled with my fork, lazily watching the cars continuously pulling up to the pumps. And from the screen poured my voice, my colloidal solution of technical perfection and moral desolation. It was one of the most narcissistic interviews ever filmed. And—horror of horrors!—the lens drilled into me, not some pop culture reject from film or music. I'd shot plenty of those guys, always hated them, always felt superior. But this time, I was in their shoes, and—I was worse.

I felt like one of those hedgehogs they use to dig trenches in the forest, if I'm understanding it right. I'm constantly bolting from the nets, my little paws scrambling, while someone else is just thrilled by the elegance of their work. I keep losing focus because my neighbors' needles are poking between my own. Ever gotten a splinter under your fingernail?

Along with the correspondents, reporters, all my colleagues, I sometimes feel like a pig. Journalism is a magical field. But what does one have to make out of oneself to be a journalist? We can demand answers to questions many others would be too scared to even ask. But aren't we the ones eagerly waiting for someone's misfortune to shoot some glorious, hot material? Like pigs, my colleagues and I eat from the same makeshift wooden trough, getting splinters on our pink snouts. We nudge each other with our hips, our soft sides rubbing against each other with dirty fur. Maybe I wasn't in the mood to rave about my profession. When I gave that interview, I was in a much better headspace. How else to explain such apparent pomp in my words? Do I look like a boastful pedant? What's your take? Oh, sorry.

When I glance over at you, through the gap between your collar and shoulder, through the spaces between your widely spaced blouse buttons, through the slit formed by your jeans—ask me why I do it! I could tear that blouse off you, those jeans! For that matter, I could tear off your skin. What professional satisfaction I get, when, without a camera in my hands, I peer into almost inaccessible openings, finding something hot, interesting, screaming—without an eyepiece that's about to give me neurotic fits!

Remember I talked about my right to sneak peeks, to scrutinize you on the sly? I do have that right. I feel it. I don't feel stupid saying it. I feel stupid when I say: "I have the right to film material that interests me." But what's the right to film got to do with it? That's not even up for debate. Though, you'd think a camera is a more imposing weapon than an eye and memory. Even when I was tailing the unforgettable Ursula and Barney from Oslo, filming everything they did together and separately—I felt no guilt towards them, I felt completely justified. That's journalism. And this—this is love.