The Weekend: Ch 7 - Epilogue

It was mid-afternoon on Monday when my phone chirped. There was a new text from Casey. She had finished packing and visited kink. She wanted to know if I was interested in getting something to eat before she left, and possibly shoot. It was questionable whether there would be enough time for both after driving through rush hour traffic to San Francisco, but I couldn't miss out on the chance and headed out to the city for the fourth time in as many days.

We had already shot all weekend, but I was greedy for more. There wasn't much time so I chose the fastest lighting setup that might produce something interesting. I took advantage of her flexibility and I captured her contorted poses. Bend, click bend, click, bend, click, each captured in quick succession. I wouldn't know whether they turned out or not until she was gone, and there wasn't time for many shots.

Afterward we went to SOMA for dinner before leaving for the airport. This time Casey talked more than before and asked me some questions about getting into photography. I don't know why, but I surprised myself by being unusually candid in my response.

Take a bit of graphite, squeeze it with a vise as tight as possible, and put into an oven. You end up with the same graphite. But heat it up to several thousand degrees under the pressure of 30,000 times the earth's atmosphere and it unexpectedly transforms into a diamond.

We had been together for four days, doing seven shoots, three of them with other models, an event performance, art show, and a lot of firsts. At my usual pace, that's months of activity squeezed into four days. I'm no diamond, but compressing so much into so little had changed me indelibly, as surely as jumping down any rabbit hole.

I didn't know if I'd ever see Casey again, but knew that the end of the Weekend was just the beginning.