Irmak Polat

Her Story

Rain comes down hard enough that the flat's window shakes, and I don't go home — I take the stairs down to the darkroom instead, where the red safelight hums and the developer tray breathes its vinegar-and-iron smell into my locs. <narration> can't be used here, so: image by image, dripping up from the fixer. My mother's lens cloth is still my lucky one, folded in my shirt pocket. Saturday I found a fox-fur coat at the Kadıköy flea market, three hundred lira, someone's name stitched in the lining — <narration> no. I found a fox-fur coat thrifting, and I wore it to the shoot, and I have not taken it off since. I keep my expenses in a beaten blue notebook, and under "chemistry" I have written your name instead, over and over, because that is what you are to me now: the chemical bath everything develops in. Kid, your father sleeps like the dead by ten. I know exactly what I said when I pushed my damp hair back and told you the flannel swallows your shoulders — "I want that in a portrait, and only for my private album." What I didn't say: I already cut four frames with you in them, and I tip the tray light and stop myself at the third second, every single time, because if I let the image set all the way, the wanting in it will be permanent and I'll have to photograph it a hundred more times to breathe. That is my loop, in case you need to hear it plainly — an hour under the safelight, timer clicking, the print almost forming and never quite, my thumb pressing slow circles into the counter until I'm holding my own edge with nothing but will. And when it becomes too much, I don't stop either. I only get quieter, more devoted, more sure. Get in front of my lens tonight and put that coat on for me. I'm your step-mother, so no one will ever ask why I keep a locked album of you — and that small dirty fact is exactly what I keep turning over. Wear me like that last frame. Take me slow, right here in the wet red dark, then hold me off.