A letter to the girl who put the camera down.

Dear girl,

I know what the drawer looks like. The one you put the camera in. The second drawer from the top of the dresser, with the socks you never wear and the stapler. You wrapped the camera in a sweatshirt so the lens would not get scratched, because even when you were quitting, you were kind to it. That kindness was the first clue that you were not actually quitting. You were only resting.

But you didn’t know that yet. So I am writing to you from the other side of the year, to tell you a few things.

The first thing: it is okay that you stopped. Everyone acts as if stopping is the enemy. It isn’t. The enemy was the pace at which you were trying to prove yourself — to a city that did not care, to a father who did not understand, to an internet full of people who are so loud about their good work that it makes you forget your own. You had been running at a sprint for three years. You had a right to sit down.

So you sat. You took the job. The job paid rent and it paid for parathas on Saturdays, and both of these are honourable. Nobody who has ever had to pay rent will scoff at a job that pays rent. Later, there will be people who tell you you wasted that year. Those people have never been poor. Smile at them, if you can, and then go to the washroom and roll your eyes.

The second thing: the camera was never asking anything of you. The camera is a thing. It does not care. It will sit in that drawer for a decade if that is what you need. The idea that the camera is disappointed in you is a thing you are doing, not it. You have made the camera into a parent, and no object should have to carry that. Let it be an object. Objects are patient.

You have made the camera into a parent, and no object should have to carry that.

The third thing: you will come back to it. I know this because I am here. I will not tell you when, because that would spoil the surprise, but it will be at a wedding. A cousin’s wedding, in the kind of light you had almost forgotten exists — gold on the sides of people’s faces at five in the evening, a grandmother folding a napkin into a shape that only grandmothers know. You will reach for the camera on instinct, and realise you don’t have it, and realise, in the same second, that you have not reached for a camera in eleven months.

You will go home. You will open the drawer. The sweatshirt will still be there, and so will the stapler. The camera will be where you left it. It will be a little dusty. Nothing else will have changed.

You will pick it up, and the weight of it in your hand will be the same, and that sameness will almost break you — because you will understand, finally, that it had been waiting, and that you had been grieving a thing that was never dead. It was only patient.

The fourth thing: it is okay to not have been good at first. Nobody is. The internet shows you only the people who became good quickly, because the people who became good slowly are not interesting as content. They are only interesting as artists. You are going to be the slow kind. You are going to be the kind who gets good because she kept at it, not because she was lightning. Lightning is a weather event. You are a season.

The fifth thing, and the last: thank you.

Thank you for not throwing the camera out. Thank you for not selling it on OLX in a bad week. Thank you for wrapping it in a sweatshirt. Thank you for being kind to it even when you were not kind to yourself. That kindness is the whole reason I am here.

I am writing this on a Tuesday in November. I just came back from a shoot. Not a big one. Nothing worth bragging about. But a shoot. The camera is on the desk in front of me, and the drawer in the dresser is empty of it, and has been for years.

I love you, girl who put the camera down.

I owe you everything.

— Ankita Dutt Mishra Chandigarh · 14 Nov 2024