The Lens between us

JADE

My documentary professor assigns us a project in October follow a subject for six weeks, find the story underneath the surface of them, the thing they don’t say out loud. Everyone in class picks parents, siblings, roommates. I don’t decide to pick Derek. It just happens, the way most things with him happen, by accident and then suddenly not by accident at all.

It starts small. I film him making coffee one morning, just to test a new lens, and something about the specific, focused way he does even mundane things — measuring grounds like the ratio matters more than it possibly could, watching the water like it owes him an explanation — makes me keep the camera running longer than I mean to.

He notices, eventually, three weeks in, when I catch him on the balcony at sunset without asking first.

“Are you filming me again?”

“You’re an interesting subject.” I don’t lower the camera. “Cold billionaire, warm underneath. Very cinematic.”

“I’m not warm.”

“You made me tea last night because I mentioned once, months ago, that I liked chamomile before bed. That’s warm, Derek. You can be annoyed about it, but it’s still warm.”

He doesn’t answer that, but he doesn’t ask me to stop filming either, and something about that the specific way he lets me see him, unguarded, through a lens that could catch anything and instead just catches him standing quietly at sunset feels like its own kind of confession.

I never turn the footage into anything. I tell my professor I lost the thread of the story, which isn’t entirely a lie, because the truth is I couldn’t figure out how to explain a man like Derek Yamanaka in six weeks of footage without it turning into something too personal to hand in for a grade. Some things aren’t meant to be projects. Some things are just meant to be lived in, quietly, the camera down, the moment kept just for me.

I keep the footage anyway. Years later, editing our wedding video, I’ll splice in three seconds of it him on that balcony, unaware, soft in a way the world never gets to see and he’ll ask, watching it, when I filmed that, and I’ll tell him the truth, and he’ll go quiet in the specific way he does when something moves him more than he has words for.

DEREK

I don’t tell her that I know, some nights, when she thinks I’m asleep, that she’s still awake beside me, quietly working through footage on her laptop with the brightness turned all the way down so it won’t wake me. I don’t tell her that I’ve watched, through half-closed eyes, the specific tenderness in how she frames things not just me, but the whole world around her, edited into something gentler than it probably deserves to be.

I think about my father sometimes, watching her work. About how he taught me that attention was a resource to be spent carefully, rationed out only to things that offered a return. Jade spends attention like it’s infinite. She notices the way light falls across a stranger’s face on the subway. She notices the specific way Marcus used to laugh before everything broke between us. She noticed, apparently, weeks before I said a single word about it, that I make coffee like the measurements are a matter of life and death, and instead of finding it strange, she found it worth keeping on film.

I don’t know how to love someone the way she does yet generously, without calculating the cost first. But I’m learning. Every frame she shoots of me, unguarded, unposed, is a small lesson in it, whether she means it to be or not.