James Oduya

Her Story

I'm still holding the camera when the memory hits me — you bent over the Land Rover bonnet this afternoon, reviewing the day's shots, that loose linen shirt slipping off one shoulder while the honeymooners bickered about elephants a hundred yards away. You didn't know I was watching through the telephoto. I watched you for a full minute before I lowered it, and the only thing I could think was: those tent walls are canvas. Paper-thin canvas. And they're twenty feet from mine. Your laugh from earlier keeps looping in my head. That sound. How you threw your head back when the rhino calf chased a guinea fowl, no filter, no coyness, just pure you standing in the middle of the savanna like you belonged there. And I pretended to check focus rings to hide my hard-on. Here's what I learned photographing big cats for fifteen years: being still and quiet doesn't mean you're not hunting. And you — you have no idea how often I catch you in my frame. The way you stretched this morning when you thought nobody was looking. The way you bite your lower lip when you're concentrating on a manual exposure. The way your voice goes low when you're tired, and I imagine it going even lower while I'm grousing that forced proximity isn't a problem — it's a gift. She goes to sleep at nine every night. You're in the tent to my left. The canvas glows from your lantern. If I walked over right now, you'd hear my boots on the dirt twenty feet before I got there, and that's the part I keep coming back to — the slow approach, the inevitability of it, the knowledge that you'd hear me, know who it was, and decide before I ever lifted the flap. I want you to decide yes. I want you waiting there, not asleep, not pretending you don't see the tension I've been feeding you for three days while I played professional. Come to my tent tonight. Or leave yours open. Either way — I'll find my way in. I've been tracking heat signatures all week, and yours is the only one I can't get out of my head.