Que sera, sera - whatever will be will be

[shadows_have_offended]

The news took a while to settle and, honestly, Neil still isn't entirely sure what to do with the knowledge. He's a college student now--or, rather, will be in September. He doesn't sign up for classes for months yet, but he's already looked over the catalog at least three times, trying to think what he'd like to do, now that he knows what he wants to do. It's all a huge relief, in a way. Maybe he can do Shakespeare in the Park again this summer. Maybe things will start to shape up more brightly.

In any case, he's celebrating. He sent out texts to all his friends, promising music and drinks and food--and a dog--to be shared by all. He tidied up a little, even, not that his apartment is ever very out of order in the first place. He doesn't really know how to decorate for a party like this, so he doesn't bother. Just makes sure there's lots of food and that the drinks are neatly arranged and that Beau's crate is set up in the bedroom, covered but open, so he can disappear if he'd like to.

He's not sure who all will come, but that doesn't really matter. He's just excited that he got in. It's the next step in his life, and it's his own step. That deserves to be celebrated no matter what.

Comments

[outofspace]

At first, though she wouldn't actually admit as much, Therese doesn't recognize the girl when she spots her across the room. She wouldn't have expected anything else to be the case with most of the people here anyway, so it's nothing that really even requires a second thought. It's when she glimpses her again that she realizes there's something familiar about her, the pieces clicking into place a few moments later. It probably helps that, though she gets out often enough and takes plenty of pictures of strangers, her circle here, such as it is, isn't a very large one.

"Hi," she says when she's found herself nearby, smiling self-consciously. "I — I think we've met, haven't we? At the hayride, last fall?"

[forthsofar]

It takes Rosie a moment of her own to place the older woman, even with the added context tacked onto the end of her question. Though the autumn carnival was only a few months past, it seemed so much had happened since then--for good and ill--that it almost seemed a different time entirely. "Oh gosh, yes, you're the photographer," she says, once she's made the connection, smiling in return. "How do you know Neil? Or...did you come with someone else?"

[outofspace]

"I do know Neil," Therese answers, more than a little relieved not to have been wrong. Even couched in a question, she can only imagine how mortified she'd have been to approach someone who turned out to be a complete stranger after all, rather than someone she really has met before. A one-time meeting isn't all that much to speak of, but in a room mostly full of people she couldn't say even that much about, it's a welcome connection all the same. "We met at a party some time back when we found out we weren't from so many years apart from each other. What about you?"

[forthsofar]

"Almost exactly the same," Rosie says, amused at the coincidence and excited to have found (from the sound of her explanation) someone else from close to her own era. "Met at a party, found out we were from only a year apart--it was 1960 for me, back home--and became friends from there."

She omits the brief embarrassment of her crush on Neil; it's not something that the woman needs to know, or maybe cares to, and the friendship that followed in its wake is far more valuable to Rosie than anything more that might have been.

"I really should've introduced myself, shouldn't I? I'm Rosie."

[outofspace]

"It was only a few years earlier for me," Therese explains, struck for just a moment by how odd it is to be able to say something like that so easily. The difference of several years should be consequential, not something to shrug off or bond over. Here, though, where people can apparently come from anywhere and anytime, there's an instinctive sense of kinship to be found in that sort of closeness. At least, there is for her, and she gets the impression from others she's met that she isn't the only one. They have to take what they can get. "1953."

"I'm Therese. It's nice to officially meet you, Rosie."

[forthsofar]

"You too, Therese," she says, glad for the reacquaintance and the fact of a name--or part of one, at least. Rosie wasn't sure if newspaper photographers had bylines in the same way reporters did, but either way, she thinks she'll keep a closer eye out for Therese's photos the next time she's paging through an issue.

"How did those photographs from the hayride come out, then?" Rosie asks, her previous train of thought making the question seem more sensical than it maybe sounds aloud. "I hope you didn't pay...whatever the price of admission was, I've forgotten now, only to be disappointed."

[outofspace]

"They came out alright," Therese says with a quiet laugh and a nod. "Served their intended purpose." She’s never been one to think very highly of her own work, whether the ones she takes for the paper or the ones she takes on her own time, but her boss seemed satisfied enough with the ones she took of the corn maze at the end of the hayride, so she supposes that’s good enough.

"I’m not much for hayrides and corn mazes, to be honest, but there were some good shots in the bunch."

[forthsofar]

"That's something, then." It had been a terribly silly question, but Rosie finds herself pleased and a little charmed by how willing Therese is to answer it anyway. "I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all either--it seemed very American, or meant for children, or...maybe both, really."

Rosie takes a sip of her drink, another question itching at the back of her mind, something curious and a little prying that she's not sure she ought to ask. Until, of course, she does. "What sorts of things would you want to take photographs of? Not corn mazes or hayrides, obviously, but if you could take a photograph of anything at all?"

[outofspace]

"Probably both," Therese says, though her American childhood had involved nothing of the sort. They'd been a bit too sheltered, she supposes, and she can't blame the nuns from her school for not wanting to wrangle a bunch of children. Then once she left, she was never really aware of anything local. Darrow might be a reasonably sized city, but it's much nearer to the countryside than where she lived in New York, where there wasn't much room for hayrides or corn mazes.

"And I don't know, really. For a while, I was just taking pictures of nature, or buildings, that sort of thing, but a friend of mine told me I should try taking more pictures of people. I'm still sort of working on that."

[forthsofar]

"That sounds lovely," she says, soft and genuine. Even though she doesn't know Therese's friend, and even though the sort of news photographs one might take of people might not involve them at their best in certain circumstances, Rosie feels a certain romance in the idea of simply capturing them in one moment in time. In a city like Darrow, where people arrive and disappear every day, it feels all the more important; some sign to say they were here.

"I hope you're able to find a way to take your friend's advice more often, someday."

[outofspace]

"I hope so, too," Therese says with a small smile. It still doesn't always come easily to her, and there's a part of her that wonders if it's intrusive just to take snapshots of strangers, but she is warming to the idea. She has been since Carol. Maybe that's why she still hasn't quite caught onto it yet, at least not entirely. She'll never have another subject like that. Thrown as she'd been by their arrival, at least she has those photographs to look at and know it was real, and that she might not be entirely untalented.

"I try to do a little, in my free time. It's probably strange, doing for fun what I also do for work, but..."