Four photographs taken many years ago. Two young women, a little light, and the kind of closeness that needs no direction because it already knows its part.
I do not remember only their smiles. What I remember most is how real they were: not offered to the camera, but born from the simple presence of one another. And perhaps that is precisely what makes certain images precious. They do not tell us who we became. Without asking questions, they preserve the moment when we were still capable of loving someone without sending them the bill.
I took these photographs many years ago.
I cannot remember the exact date, but perhaps that is what years do once they begin to pile up: they carry away the numbers and leave the temperature of things untouched.
I remember the light.
I remember the cold suggested by their coats, the low sun on their faces, and above all those smiles. Not the tidy smile people arrange when someone raises a camera. You recognize that one immediately: teeth on display, eyes absent, soul temporarily parked elsewhere.
This was different.
One smiles toward the lens, wrapped in a black hood. The other lets the light strike her, hair across her face. But the photograph that truly tells the whole story is the one in between, when they look at each other.
There, the camera almost ceases to exist.
They are no longer posing for me. They are reacting to each other. There is a sentence we cannot hear, a private joke, perhaps some old piece of teasing repeated a hundred times until it became part of their language. One of those bits of nonsense no one else could understand, yet enough to make two friends laugh before the words are even finished.
That is what complicity is: a conversation that begins long before the words.
They were very young. Perhaps still free from some of the conditioning life eventually tries to paste onto us. Suspicion. Calculation. The fear of giving more than we receive. That emotional bookkeeping of wounded little accountants: I called you three times, you only called twice; I was there when you were hurting, where were you when it was my turn?
As we grow older, we become excellent at keeping score.
The pity is that, in the meantime, we often forget how to love.
The world is full of relationships turned into unspoken contracts. People who give you something while silently waiting for the next installment. Affection offered as a down payment. Favors with interest. Presences that seem free until the invoice arrives, perhaps in the middle of an argument, itemizing everything you thought had been done out of love.
Real friendship should be the opposite of all that shit.
Not an investment.
Not an insurance policy against loneliness.
Not someone kept nearby in case they might prove useful one day.
Simply someone you love. Not because they complete you, save you, or owe you anything, but because their existence makes the landscape a less hostile place.
A friend is not necessarily the person who fixes your disasters. Sometimes there is absolutely nothing they can do. They sit beside the wreckage, hand you a drink, and stay while you curse the architect—or yourself, which is often the same person anyway.
They do not demand brilliance when you are tired.
They do not ask you to be cheerful just to make their evening more comfortable.
They do not turn your weakness into currency to be spent at the first opportunity.
They know when to speak, when to give you shit, and when to leave you alone without making you feel abandoned.
It is a form of love that often has the decency not to make a fucking drama out of itself.
It needs no solemn promises, rings, or speeches delivered before an audience. No blood binds you, no desire muddles the cards. There are only two people who continue to choose each other while remaining free to leave.
And it is precisely that freedom that makes their presence precious.
To truly love someone is not to say, “Stay because I need you.”
It is to say, “You could leave, but I am glad you are here.”
I do not know whether these two women are still friends today. Inventing an answer would be dishonest, and asking a photograph to guarantee eternity would be unfair. Time changes people, moves cities, screws up priorities, and sometimes separates even those who seemed inseparable.
But something that ends does not automatically become a lie.
We have this terrible habit of judging the truth of a feeling by how long it lasted, as though only what remains forever could have been authentic. Yet some bonds endure a lifetime without containing a single moment of true closeness, while brief encounters can see us more clearly than anyone else ever has.
Photography does not promise forever.
Forever is an enormous, vain word, and it is often full of shit.
Photography can do something smaller and more honest: bear witness that, at that precise moment, something was true.
And in these images, it was.
The first woman’s smile was true.
So was the second’s.
So was the way their eyes sought each other, as though amid everything happening around them they had already found their safe place.
Perhaps they did not know it then. Perhaps they never thought about it at all. The best things rarely stop to explain their importance while they are happening. They simply happen, and we realize it years later while rummaging through old photographs.
Four images.
Two young women.
No grand declarations.
Only that simple, exceedingly rare thing that happens when someone loves us without trying to possess us, repair us, or receive something in return.
In the first and third photographs, they smile toward me.
In the second, they look at each other.
And that is where you understand everything.
They were not smiling because there was a camera.
They were smiling because the other one was there.