The Space Between Us
The light here is different. Not warmer exactly. More insistent. It finds the edges of things. It finds the space between.
I came to Spain in transition. Not fleeing anything, not arriving anywhere specific. Just in the between. And I’ve been thinking about what that means. Not the leaving. Not the arriving. But the awareness that lives in the middle, when you haven’t yet become what you are going somewhere to become.
We move through these spaces as though they are not the thing that calls our awareness.
I was walking somewhere. I wasn’t looking. I was moving. Then I saw them. Two elderly people walking. Their hands held together, not with any urgency, simply held.
I stopped.
I don't know why it broke something the way it did. Perhaps because I had been somewhere else in my mind, so occupied with the next place. The poetry of the moment arrived anyway.
What I kept returning to was absence. The absence of hurrying. The absence of the next thing. The space between their pace and mine. Their hands were saying something I wasn’t saying within myself. Something I had forgotten was a language. And then the thought: this is not common where I come from. Not this. Not this visible, unhurried tenderness between two people who have been alive and together a long time.
There’s a reason I left the world of design and development. Or… that’s not quite right. That world left me, slowly, the way certainty does. I spent years in that world understanding that everything communicates, that form carries meaning, that the distance between elements is as important as the elements themselves.
But fluency can become closure.
What I’m trying to do with a camera isn’t design. It’s not organizing information. It’s standing still long enough to be in the presence of something that hasn’t yet been named. The foggy mornings I keep returning to. The filtered light. These aren’t effects. They’re states of not-knowing. I’m trying to photograph the moment just before recognition locks everything into place.
Two people holding hands on a Spanish street. An image that arrives before its meaning clearly does.
What I noticed was that the moment didn’t need me to understand it. It existed completely, without my comprehension. And I was there for perhaps four seconds before my body remembered it had somewhere to be.
There are stories happening constantly, at the edges, in the between. Most of us pass through them. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just how living works.
But I keep the image. The particular weight of a held hand. The light that morning, the way it found the edges of everything.
Something happened while I was getting somewhere else. I didn’t rush past it entirely.
Whether that is enough, I honestly don't know.
