Blogprov: Winner: [Servo]
[ARCHIVE: Another female POV. I think I just kind of associated female characters with authority in regards to love. I've always put a little of myself into my stories, but this one was the most blatant, expecting the little tweaks to protect the innocent. I have a penchant for trying to find 'artsy' photography shots. I toyed with the idea of majoring in criminology and/or film. My family owned a Jeep, and I lived in Merced, CA, the gateway to Yosemite. And of course, Stephanie's thoughts mirrored my own at the time. I was thinking of an old high school crush and whether I would ever see her again. For the record, I never have, but I still think about her once in a while.]
We had finally reached the top, and it was now time to go through with it. My legs shivered not from fear but nervousness. It had been four years since I saw him last, but in my mind I was even younger than that, only fourteen. I willed myself not to run away. I would not pass up this opportunity.
All his life, he had planned to climb to the top of Half-dome. When we were children, our families out together on a collective camping trip, he would point out the glacier-made peak and say "One day, Steph, I’m going to climb to the top, and look down on the entire forest, and I’m gonna stay up there until I can see the sunset."
I would give him a questioning look and ask him why that was such an aspiration. "Because the world is beautiful, and I want to see as much of it as I can at one time!" At this I would giggle, then he would pinch me for laughing at him, and we would end up chasing each other until dinner time.
Alex had a certain eye for what he considered beautiful. The framing, the color, he knew exactly where to look upon an empty street so that you paused, the art of the moment washing over you. He never worked with people, despite the number of girls falling over themselves to pose for him. It was always the stray mutt, the abandoned boat next to the highway, the singular tree on the Stepfords' lawn. The only person he ever took pictures of was me.
It was game for us. Me, watching my kid sister on the jungle gym. Alex, somehow getting within a foot of me and snapping the shot before I noticed. I would whack him on the shoulder, chiding him for deviating from his modus operandi. A boyish smile, an absent-minded ear scratching, a flippant response, "I don’t shoot only non-people things, I shoot only beautiful things."
A single sentence would send me into a euphoric whirlwind for days. Heart-shaped doodles in my notebooks, promptly ripped apart within a week when I saw him talking to Sandy Goldstein. I tried to act aloof, to act cold and angry, but it would melt away with a boyish grin, an absent minded ear scratch.
And then the crush, so important and life-consuming, was filed away like so many other memories. Junior year we had different crowds and talked little. Senior year, even less. After graduation, he moved to Chicago, while I went to school down in Berkeley. He didn’t come back for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Spring Break. He didn’t come back for the Summer, nor the following year or the year after that.
Years passed. I earned my degree in Criminology (and a minor in film). Two weeks before I started graduate school, I was back in Fresno visiting the parents and packing up things. Dad sprung a surprise on us, asking us to help christen his new Jeep. He pleaded for one last family camping trip as if we would have turned him down. One last time, before Kelly went to college and I settled into my apartment in Berkeley, we sang in the car and we took pictures next to the Redwood rings.
We made it to our campsite in the late afternoon; Mom insisted on setting up the fire well before dark. A group of people came up the hill to greet us, the Bates, our campmates from the past. We traded hugs and handshakes, "My-you've-grown"s and "Still-got-hair"s. "Hey, where’s Alex?"
"Oh, he’s off doing his own thing. He set out to hike up Half-dome just after lunch."
I reached the peak as the sky reached its reddest. He was sitting, his feet dangling off the sheer edge. I looked at him and wondered how somebody who was so important to me could seem like such a stranger now, and in that instant I resolved to change that.
Slowly, cautiously, I made my way to him, inching myself forward until we sat side by side. In front of us, an ocean of green forest rolled over gentle hills. The sun kissed the horizon, splashing hues of rose and crimson across the sky. "It’s a beautiful view up here," I breathed.
He paused for a second then turned to face me. With a boyish smile, he absent-mindedly scratched his ear. "It is now."
