Oli stops at the foot of the stairs, startled by Lark shadowed in the light of the television. His eyes look hollowed out, pale hair turned into a flickering halo. A stranger and strange to look at. He and Oli haven’t known each other very long.

Lark is watching The Fellowship of the Ring on the old TV, and the hobbits are escaping Bree, with tinny screeching and the screen strobe of lightning. Oli’s heart slows.

“Did I wake you?” Lark asks. His voice is soft, tentatively just more than a whisper.

“No, no. I have insomnia.”

Oli goes to the kitchen and pours them both a glass of water. The light spills into the living room, and Lark turns on a table lamp, too.

Lark apologizes when he takes the water from Oli instead of thanking him.

Now Oli can see him properly, Lark doesn’t have any eerie qualities to him at all. He’s sitting on the sofa with his knees up to his chin; a thin-faced man with big eyes, he looks younger than he is.

The pillow and blanket Oli and Reed brought to make the couch more comfortable for Lark are still neatly stacked and folded even though it is well past two in the morning.

“You can’t sleep either?”

Lark shakes his head. He’s shuffling a stack of instant photos, and Oli thinks of Lark with his old Instax, tucking candids into his back pocket.

“Did you get any good shots?”

“I picked out a few, for you and Reed. If you want them,” Lark says, and passes three pictures to him. Reed is blowing uselessly on a flaming marshmallow in one, and Oli lets out a surprised yelp of laughter when he sees it. Lark smiles a little at that. Though his lips are still pressed in a thin line over his teeth, Oli’s relieved to see any genuine expression on his face. All night, Lark has only looked stunned and anxious. It worried Oli, had played into his nighttime anxiety.

“The rest are no good?” Oli asks.

Lark is still absently riffling the corners of his photo stack. He shrugs. “These are fine. Just my collection.”

“Can I?” Oli asks.

Lark hesitates but passes him the pictures. The collection has been growing for a long time, almost seven years. Each is carefully timestamped with silver marker on the back. Lark doesn’t think he’s ever captured anything important, cannot seem to trap any feeling in his photos, but they chronicle something. At least for him.

The dates count upwards towards the future. Lark sometimes needs to close his eyes against the threat of time. If there was someone who could hold his hand and walk him blindfolded through his life, he thinks he might be able to bear it.

He cannot look forward. But he looks back.

Usually, that hurts worse.

It was my first year out of high school, and I spent it working retail and attempting to salvage the soloist career I dreamed of. I came home and ate rice, played the practice keyboard in my room for three hours, and then slept like the dead until my alarm woke me up again. The laundry piled up around my pedals. On weekends, I played synths in Max's garage, ate his parent's snacks through songwriting sessions, kicked around with friends.

We talked, sometimes, about our plans. My housemates Reed and Cassie were studying, always nudging us to think about the future, anxious like we'd already made a horrible mistake. Max still thought he could be a rock star, and I was banking on a scholarship to conservatory, a second try success. I spent all my money on piano lessons. When I could afford it, I'd take a sick day and drive down to New York for a masterclass. Dana, a year behind us but still our best friend, had applied to all the east coast art schools.

The Instax camera was a birthday gift from her. Dana's passion for the minutiae of light and lens had produced a Flickr page filled with details that seemed intimate to me then: the aftermath of house parties, my collection of sheet music under a dirty glass, Max restringing his electric guitar. Its plastic body was a neon blur of Lisa Frank stickers his little sister had grown out of. She's the kind of kid that likes things too much to use them, he said. Max wasn't as sentimental.

I knew that these pictures had been collected into a portfolio that got Dana into RISD, but I didn't want to think what bleak commentary she'd put in, or how much of it was my worn-out face or Max's beaten up car. She brought her camera bag to all of our miserable pasta dinners.

I was turning nineteen, and we weren't doing anything. Max was working, and Reed left a gift card to Guitar Center under my door before disappearing off to campus. But Dana stayed, sat with me on the cot in my room, opened the first pack of film and put it in the camera, took a photo of my keyboard as a test shot. The shot rolled out of the camera, a pleasing white blankness.

I'd never owned a Polaroid or anything before, but I thought you were meant to shake them. Dana laughed and took the photo away from me. She opened the breast pocket of my denim jacket and tucked it inside. Her nails were powder pink, and her right ear, sticking out through her hair, was full of small silver hoops.

You don’t have to do anything, she said. It’s self-developing. Keep it out of the light and wait.