Notes from the darkroom.

#12: on contact

You remember exactly which frame it was.

That one moment stayed with you ever since you pressed the shutter.

You’ve carried it through weeks of waiting; through development, through the slow promise of a film drying.

Knowing it would be there, exactly as you remembered.

When the contact sheet finally comes out, the first glance feels like reunion.
Familiar shapes, old emotions, fragments of a story returning in small squares.

You glance along the strip, confident, and you reach it. That number seven, halfway down.

It’s there, but somehow it isn’t.

The light has changed. The focus feels off, though you know it’s not.
Whatever moved you to press the shutter has drifted out of reach.

You tell yourself it’s nothing.
A bad exposure, the wrong paper maybe.
You’ll see it clearly once enlarged.
You always do.

So you try.

You slip the negative into the carrier, align the edges, expose what you still believe in. The square brightens on the easel, full of hope and memories.
You develop, stop, fix.

And watch as the image refuses to return, like that voice gone quiet.

You don’t know why. You never will. Some endings arrive without cause, only distance.

You stay there for a while, looking. Not at the loss, but at the trace of what it meant.

The path that led you to click, the moment shared, the belief you could make it last forever.

And maybe it will. Just not where you thought.
Some connections fade from paper but hold in memory; like light that travelled too far to still be seen, yet still exists somewhere.

And somewhere on that contact sheet, another frame is waiting.

Not to replace what’s gone, but to remind you that seeing never stops;
only pauses until the mind opens again.