Anima

I want to witness the anima.

No, that isn't right.

I want to dip my hands into the ether running through the neurons of every creature's sparking thoughts and swim through their consciousness until I understand the vices of their being. I want to rip it free and chew on it until I've tasted every last molecule. It's an obsession. The yearning is so deep it terrifies me. It still isn't right. I want to hold hands with her soul.

There isn't a way yet for me to touch the invisible.

The yearning, the obsession, the all-consuming desire to pet the butterfly's wings, leave me hungry. I'm more ruthless than I mean to be, cutting through creative ideas and tossing them in the trash without a second thought. No, stepping into another world through writing doesn't do. A paintbrush loses something in the stroke.

The camera is something else.

It sees in still frames.

Reality is broken down into tiny pieces, microseconds scattered like building blocks with a shutter click. The camera is a thing with teeth. It can bite through fluid moments in time and catch something unique and individual. It throws a net into the present and catches the past.

Sometimes it's lucky enough to coax out the myth of the anima. Sometimes the camera tricks its subject into forgetting its existence and it manages to sink its teeth into something it was never supposed to witness.

That is the camera.

Then there is the dog. She's still the pink runt in my head when all the other pups were white. She was the Dalmatian with one spot when the rest had ten.

Eyes lined in pretty black makeup and white eyelashes, her face was a thing of beauty. Her soul was a soft thing, voiceless but loud. And I knew that I would not be able to remember how she looked at me in the morning. How she watched the squirrels. How she told me in perfect silence that she loved me.

Every soul has its flavor the way every month has its color and hers was so unique I couldn't hope to remember the recipe. It was something fresh from the mind of the universe and I wasn't a match for that kind of magic.

I would forget. I knew that without a doubt.

The camera and the dog collide.

She wasn't the most energized dog in the world, often opting to sit and stare out the windows for hours, watching the planes of all things pass overhead. She enjoyed listening to the wind and sniffing through the screen door with her eyes closed as the breeze moved over her face. She loved the smell of thunderstorms. The sun though was her favorite of all. She loved to watch the world pass by with the morning sun right on her face.

It was the first try that gave me this picture.

I didn't need a second or a third. The camera lunged and snagged a perfect catch. It dropped a snapshot of her soul in my lap as though it hadn't done the most magical thing I had ever experienced and gave me a moment frozen in time where she had let her soul rise to the surface of her eyes.

The soul is an elusive thing to catch and though I've taken too many pictures to count of eyes, I often fail to capture something more. But sometimes luck is on my side. Sometimes I can mimic the fortune of that first shot, coax the soul out of its hiding place, and snap a picture that stretches between a trapped moment in time to the depths of something timeless.