Any Given Moment

15 Minute Write

At any given moment in time decisions are being made that could change lives: telephone calls, signatures on papers, meetings taken or missed, opportunities accepted or rejected. We will never know the outcome had we taken another path, whether we had made a different decision. Perhaps the tendrils of the roots of the seed we plant are impossible to follow - that one decision is but a tiny thread of the fabric of the future. The significance can be so great and yet we are seemingly always sure that there is a wrong or a right path in our guts.

Jake became obsessed with these moments or more exactly, trying to capture them in candid photographs to somehow understand the process, the emotions, the approach to making decisions that he experienced, personally, being so hard. He felt he should be capable of these large decisions but because he could not, he felt his life was nowhere near as rich as it should or could be.

And so he would wander the streets for hours observing people on their phones, talking to each other, writing postcards or letters, sending emails on their laptops. It was a definite learnt craft, to see which ones were making decisions of value, that he became better and better at. There was usually something in their demeanor, often troubled or pained, which alerted him - a certain body language that exuded a fear or worry. Those who were flippant, happy or confident were not interesting to him. Even though he accepted that important decisions were probably being made it seemed to him that they were not ones which were perceived, by their perpetrators, to be ‘important’.

It was not lost on him that the taking of a photograph was, to some extent, as important a choice as the decision he was trying to capture. Was he invading privacy? Would he be spotted? Would there be consequences? Was it even a genuine moment? He could never truly be sure.

There were places he gravitated towards. Coffee shops where people sat with their laptops, the backstreets where folk snuck out to have a smoke, away from the desk or bar, with their phones. Outside of the Courts of Law or police stations. But by far his favourite were the offices - he would seek out those where he could get to see where people were working. 

Again he had his favourite places and this is where he found himself now. This building, the whole side of which, had glass corners where people would come and go. Today, his luck was in as he spied a man on his phone in an agitated state - he quickly lifted his camera and snapped a few shots before the man turned and disappeared out of view. Jake felt sure this was an important moment he had captured and was looking forward to getting home to study the photograph for clues when the guy appeared again looking,  it seemed, right towards him. Did he detect a little nod from that head with the phone pushed against it?

As Jake lifted his camera one more time he felt a jolt to his head as if being thrown forwards as you would in a car crash or rollercoaster ride. This was instantly followed by a headache worse than anything he had ever experienced and then a blackness of blood seeping which made him descend to a place of nothing, either as cause or effect of him passing out.

Manchester. March 2024. Nikon d750