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Galatia
By Suki
Yaten likes photographs because Yaten knows the world is different when seen through a lens.
He likes to blur and focus his horizons, and he likes to pull his gaze through square-cut boundaries. In photographs, things are condensed and compressed, and he appreciates them more for that. Because it is a mysterious fact of life that what is precious to him is most beautiful when it's restricted.
--
Yaten is a connoisseur of beautiful images. He has the photographic eye, a gift for conception. So he can see that she is plainly beautiful.
But when he frames her through his fingers (discreetly because he wouldn't want them to know), he sees that she is a masterpiece. And not all long-tangled-limbs-and-golden-hair lovely . . . but a thrill of poetry lovely.
How very real she is.
--
Yaten knows the old tale:
Some artist, long ago, received an unspoken challenge (think you can do better?) and she was the result. And when he was finished, no one could quite remember whether or not the goddess of love ever existed before then; but at any rate, she was there, and she was awake, and she was in love.
Poor bastard.
Yaten knows.
--
She pulsates, and his lens (whether camera, or fingers, or lash-framed, florescent eyes) follows her.
But Yaten likes only photographs. Because photographs are still. And so he sets himself the task of un-doing her animation, drawing the rose color from her ceramic skin, drawing the breath out of her lungs (oh-so subtle). It is a painstaking and careful process, during which he removes her humanity from his canvas. Before long, he has a carefully crafted portrait, a living sculpture, but – oh! – how very still she is, how very, very unreal.
--
It is a sun be-speckled day, and the light sprays from her hair like water, and he watches her from a cool distance as she laughs mirthfully with her friends in the schoolyard.
Did he create her of did she create him?
And he puts his fingers out and frames her and won't let her leave those safe boundaries.
It was easier when he hated her.
But he doesn't hate her, doesn't hate her at all (did he ever, really?), so he snapshots and won't let her move out of this still-life into his real one.
Because Yaten knows that what is precious is most beautiful when it's restricted.
Galatia: from a Greek myth, in which a woman-hater sculpts the perfect woman, Galatia, and falls in love with her; he begs the goddess of love (Venus) to bring her to life for him.