Through the looking glass: A love letter to my digital camera

I see her before she sees me. She lifts me from the desk, fingertips brushing the smudges from my lens, and for a moment, the world sharpens. 

We’ve done this before: she presses a button, and with a mechanical click, I capture her world. 

Today, Wyman Park glows under Baltimore’s gaze, and tomorrow, the sunset over Inner Harbor will feel like melancholy. Wherever she goes, I follow. Be it a small outing with her friends all the way to Fells Point, or a nostalgic rainy day on Homewood Campus that reminds her of home. Every time is ritualistic; the essence of it remains the same: I open my eyes, and she lets me translate what she can’t say. I capture how the water in the stream in Wyman Park folds into itself, how her friends and her smile under the city lights along the harbor — a well-deserved break after midterms. I catch it all, hold it still for her.

It has been this way for a long, long time. First international travel. First day of high school. First prom. First high school graduation walk rehearsal. Even on her first day of college, back when she set me on the narrow shelf by the window of the dorm. Photos bloom around me — her very first dorm picture, a shared laugh with her parents caught mid-motion.

I am not alive, but I remember.

When she leaves for class, I wait in the dimness. Dust drifts through the air, soft as the pixels that sleep within me. Sometimes, I replay the last image I took. I don’t need words to understand; I read it in the light, in the shutter speed, in the way her hands linger on me when she’s lonely.

When she lifts me to her face, she squints through me like I’m a window she can step into. I show her what she already sees but more carefully, more slowly, stripped of all the white noise. The world becomes shapes, lines, patches of color, breaths of light. Through me, she watches strangers on benches, squirrels darting across paths, friends clasping hands and leaning close to talk. 

I can tell she likes this — people-watching through a lens, a valid excuse for an introverted hobby. She frames and reframes until a moment feels right. 

At night, when the dorm lights go out and the campus quiets, my battery light glows faintly in the dark. A single red heartbeat. Waiting. Tomorrow she’ll pick me up again, and we’ll go out on campus once more. I’ll show her that the world is still worth looking at.

Then, a click, and the picture is mine to keep. And maybe, just maybe, it is hers too.

Samika Jain is a freshman studying Molecular and Cellular Biology from Mumbai, India.