I say, “When silence disappears, that’s where nothingness begins,”
and she’s skeptical – I can see it in the crinkle between the eyes.
She says, “When silence ends, isn’t that where sound begins?”
because she’s the kind who sees everything that way.
Always a continuum for her, like when darkness disappears
then there must be light – maybe a circle better describes it
Our thinking is like black and white photographs: from the negative,
the whites become shades of gray to black, the blacks, shades of gray to white.
She’s searching the shelves for a book called My Camera,
a classic, she says, that will help me understand the way we see things.
I think of the last camera I owned, before my first iPhone
and know it is gone, very lost or trash long since.
Finally, she says, her search done, “It’s not here anywhere,”
and I say, “Exactly.”
Lanning Lee 