By Nous November 10, 2002 -Saturday- Standing at my bedside, viewing and sliding my newly developed photo- graphs into my last photo album, I realize how old these rolls of film must have been, because there are pictures of times that I have almost completely forgotten. Moments with my cousin whom I did not visit the entire summer break, and pictures of my deceased dog, Fox, taken around early March or so, and developed only this month. November. It is the month when the world goes to sleep; consequently, the fall in me sparks the feeling that I am walking amongst dead people, through a quasi-world of memories waiting to go out, reading some dead man's diary on a tombstone - a posthumous letter to the world. Seeing my dead dog in a photograph adds weight to all the melodrama of fall. My dog, Fox, back from the dead. I begin to feel as if the world is moving at lightning speed while I stand here idly admiring myself in these artistic efforts. I become a blurred image against the noise of the world. I am hardly here at all. Sliding my dog into one of the album's pockets, I hear the phone ring, and tear the pocket in half. I sigh, leaving Fox to dangle halfway into the album, and make my overly-dramatic trek to the living room, answering the phone with the standard, perky, "Hello?" I know the chance of anyone calling me between the hours of twelve and five lies somewhere between one to two percent chance. I am not let down. "Is your mom or dad home?" After five o' clock, the numbers jump to a startling two to three percent chance. "No, no one is here." Apparently, the man on the phone is named Juan, and, apparently, I know him. But what is even more apparent, both to myself and to Juan, is that I do not remember him at all. I have no idea who I am speaking with. After a brief, but drawn out awkwardness in which we do not say much other than those polite phrases that do not mean anything, he asks me if he can speak with Jake (my brother's friend who happens to be at our house). I step outside and head towards the trampoline (where Jake and my brother occasionally wrestle) and hand the phone to Jake. But as I step outside, I see a dog at the gate that bears a striking resemblance to Fox, only this dog is brown, whereas Fox was exactly like a tiny rottweiler - all black with brown on his face and paws. Handing the phone to Jake, and heading back inside, I see that the dog has not moved at all. I walk towards the door, and then pause, looking at the dog, and involuntarily whistling for it to come nearer. He growls, barks once, and runs away through the gate and to the freedom of the front yard, heading down the street. I realize that the reason he had entered the backyard was to go through a trash bag that was supposed to be taken to the front yard for the garbage men to take away to some landfill. I start towards the garbage bag, planning to put it somewhere safe from the piracy of nomadic dogs, when I see that the grass from the garbage bag to the front gate is spotted by what appears to be white spraypaint. I follow the trail to the gate where it stops, and bend down to inspect the trail, when suddenly, my neighbor's dog barks. The thing about my neighbor's dog is that it never shuts up. And the thing about the tall, wooden fence that keeps me safe from this stupid, vicious dog is that it has a gap right where I'm standing. The dog's head is halfway through the fence, barking away, and so I immediately and involuntarily jump in place. I quickly and angrily turn my head to face the dog, feeling very unlucky that it does not understand facial expressions. I get up to go inside and see Jake jumping on the trampoline and talking on the phone, and my brother sitting on the top step of a ladder. "Weird." I say, partly to myself and partly to my brother. I am hardly here at all. -Sunday- The credits roll and Cake starts playing. Watching movies on Sunday never feels right. Just as I am about to rewind the movie, the phone rings. It's about one o' clock, so my guess is it's not for me. I head towards the kitchen to pour myself some tea (practically what I live on). I reach for a glass and grab a bowl instead. "Damn it." The Almighty Phone rings. I fumble around and finally grab a glass, opening the refrigerator door at the same time. Pouring the tea, I reach into the freezer and grab some ice. "Ice..." I say to no one at all. Ring. Ring. I feel my foot hit something soft so I kick it out of the way. I look at the clock and notice that tomorrow is Monday. I do not know how that correlates, but it is what I think. All this as I plop ice into my tea. "La la la..." A tune I do not know. Ring. Ri- "Good," I think. "They've stopped." My brother pokes his head out of his room and asks, "Why didn't you answer the phone?" I shrug. I drink tea and rewind the movie, hopping around as I do so, and switch- ing the channel to Comedy Central and the Discovery Channel and AMC and TCM and TNN and NBC. All this as my brother waits to see if the phone rings again. It does. "Hello?....Oh, hey, what's up?" He walks to his room. "It's never for me." I think. I say this even though I probably would not feel like talking anyway. I head into my room to look through my photo albums. The photography assignment was to take all the pictures required on a checklist that our teacher gave to us. I did not do it for the most part, so I am looking for old photos of mine that match the requirements. Photography is now officially a serious class, or so the teacher would have it seem. After her last semester and some of this semester, the students in photography class do not consider it a class so much as a social event, and suddenly, at this stage, Ms. Stillwell decides that it is time for work. And the first assignment is one that no one does. Looking through the old photographs, I say to myself, "I love it." I do not know exactly what I mean, but I am sure I love something. My photographs, perhaps? "These people are dead." I say. I still do not know what I mean. Maybe taking someone's photograph is like stealing their soul. If you were to consider those two sentences a pair, you would have what you might presume to be the reason behind my fascination with photography. Maybe I like stealing people's souls. "Maybe your death is your ultimate goal," someone once said to me. I think if anything, that's the pretty way to look at life. That's painting everything pink, in my opinion. Our ultimate goal usually lies between birth and death, and as far as I can read in people, it's nothing they really want to discuss. And it is completely possible that their death is my ultimate goal. It is very possible that mine is theirs. Death is just a deadline. Actually, the reason that I like photography so much is that I am given the chance to freeze any moment onto film that I wish. I do not live for the moment, so I have the moment live for me in an album of moments that have gone unlived, but will live forever. Sometimes, I just want something to claim as my own, which is normal, but it is one of those normal things that you do not discuss. I smile as I look at the photos - the moments that I murdered in order to hold them forever. I laugh, remembering the situation of a certain photograph. And then I spill tea on myself. "No tea, no how!" I say with genuine anger. But I still have no idea what I mean.