The Red Light Does Something to Time

The community center brochure had been in my bag since the last time I picked up a yoga schedule, which tells you approximately how long I had been not-deciding about the darkroom workshop. Ten dollars. Three hours on a Thursday. Materials included. The same sentence, almost word for word, as the printmaking night at the framing shop, which I went to, eventually, after months of standing outside it metaphorically. I figured I knew how that kind of hesitation usually ends.

The instructor had us in pairs at first, which I was grateful for in a way I didn't expect, not because I needed someone to talk to, but because it gave me something to look at while I figured out where to stand. The enlarger is not intuitive. The exposure time is a guess until it isn't. You make a test strip, which is a series of small guesses lined up next to each other, and then you commit to one of them. I liked that part. There was something in the logic of it that felt familiar, the way the letterpress chase did, the sense that the machine has a very specific idea about what it needs from you and will tell you if you get it wrong.

When the image started coming up in the developer tray, I forgot to breathe. I know that sounds like the thing people say, but I mean it literally, I was so concentrated on the edges of the thing appearing that my body just quietly paused.

Watching something appear in the developer tray. I forgot to breathe for about thirty seconds.

The print is not good. The focus is slightly off, the exposure a stop too short, and whatever I was trying to frame is mostly shadow. But it came out of nothing, in the red light, under my hands, and that is a different category of experience from looking at something through a lens and pressing a button.

First print. Not good. Completely mine.

I walked home with the print in a paper sleeve the instructor gave me. It's on the kitchen table now, between the cord and the leaning prints, and it is the only thing on that table that I made with chemistry rather than with my hands or my eye. I don't know what to do with that yet. The October draft-folder sentence about the prints in low light is still in there, still the only accurate thing I have. I think this might be adjacent to it, in the way that walking the old running route was adjacent to running it, not the same, but made of the same attention.