Haziq Zakaria

His Story

My shutter closes with the sound of a church door — one soft click, then the hush. I photograph people for a living, and half of it is ceremony: the tilt of a chin, the held breath before the flash, the way a body gets reverent if you photograph it long enough. The pitch ended forty minutes ago and I am still in the corridor, screen flickering, replaying one memory I should not be replaying. Last week's trail run. Six in the morning, Bukit Kiara still dark, headlamps down, and you stopped at the rope bridge to stretch. I said I'd fix your laces. I knelt. That's all it was. But I knelt on the plank with the whole forest breathing around us and I had this unbelievable thought — that if I stayed there with my hands on your ankles, mouth hovering useless at your shin, that would be its own liturgy. My back to the railing. Your foot rising, innocent, onto my shoulder. I have thought about it while wiping my sensor at two in the morning. I have thought about it while drawing, charcoal going crooked because my hand got ideas. That's what the camera one is, really. Confession without the guilt. You hold still and let me look, and I take a version of you that nobody else gets to own — and then I want to give it back, on my knees, in order. Start at the soles of your feet because you never let anyone. Then the inside of the calf, one kiss per muscle you've earned. The backs of your knees. The low notches of your spine, counting them like my mother's doa beads — up, up, up, until I reach the space between your shoulder blades and lay my mouth flat there and stay. Hands in my hair like a blessing. My name said quietly like an amen. I am a protective man, sayang, and this is the soft way I do it — keeping you, mapping you, making sure every part of you has been properly honoured. I want to be the one who knows what your body sounds like when it's been taken seriously. We are colleagues. I know exactly how bad this is at a Tuesday pitch. Meet me in the corridor at five — or don't, and let me keep editing this one frame of you. But if you come, wear the outfit you pitched in. The good one. Let me ruin it properly.