I like to take photos of water at an angle. Elsewhere, another time, I took a photograph of myself sitting in a small cove in Auckland. The sky and the bay are faintly tilted. The world looks like its curving, somehow, away from how it usually is, even though we know the earth to be curved.
I can't have taken the photo myself. The angle is impossible. I'm being viewed from a distance.
For the first time in a long time I felt happy on a molecular level. I was glad to be far from home.
I am still far away and, I'm pleased to say, still happy. I've returned to a previous patch of water, a salt-water pool. I take another photograph, this too at an angle, nudging the world off-grid.
When I inspect the photograph something has disappeared. There should be a white-tailed deer in the background. The deer is standing in the field beyond. I can see it. It hasn't moved. I take another photo, check the screen on my phone. The deer isn't there. I check the real world. It exists. It's in precisely the same place, watching me, alert.
The low resolution of my phone camera and the low light of evening mean that the outline of the deer isn't sharp enough to mark its presence on the screen. Even if I zoom in, there's just a dull spoil of pixels where I think the deer should appear, and even then I can't be sure. I never really considered I could take a photo of something so clearly in the world, only for it not to be recorded.
In the basement, I trap and release slow processions of insects. They tend to appear one at a time. Wasps that look like beetles, or beetles that look like wasps, are common. I stand with a water glass and a thin sheet of cardboard, waiting for them to dip below the window sash so they can be caught. If I start killing insects down here, the body count will get out of hand within weeks. My karma will never recover. I have to save them and let them go. It's work. When I release them into the outdoors, it's unclear whether they know they are free, even as they break into the sky.
Some things vanish from in front of you, others linger. Halfway down the track towards the corn fields and the river: the smell of a dead fawn. I'm told the vultures gathered in their dozens, picked the place clean, but the rot lingers in the heat. In the basement, I spilled a few drops of tea tree oil and it means that part of the linoleum now shines more deeply than its surroundings. On the mantel of the bricked-up fireplace: a small tin of lavender-scented lip balm, soothing, except for the sticky residue left by its price sticker. I have tried removing it with water and soap and the blunt edge of a butter knife, but it won't go anywhere. It won't even transfer itself from one surface to another. It likes where it lives. It likes where it's ended up.
