I thought lending my father’s camera to my best friend was a small act of trust. When it came back damaged and incomplete, her silence started feeling more troubling than the loss.
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The plastic grocery bag was sitting on my porch when I got home.
At first, I nearly walked past it.
Then I saw the familiar black camera strap through the thin plastic, and my stomach tightened.
There was a note tucked under one of the handles.
“Thanks hon, sorry — crazy week, I’ll call you!!”
I stood there staring at it longer than I should have.
The camera was a Pentax K1000.
It had belonged to my father, and it was the only thing of his I kept.
That mattered more than I knew how to explain.
My dad had owned plenty of things.
There were boxes of clothes, old tools, books with cracked spines, and random kitchen gadgets he had collected over the years.
After he died, I couldn’t keep them all.
The camera was different.
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I remembered him carrying it everywhere when I was young.
He would hold it against his chest while adjusting the focus.
Then he would squint through the viewfinder like whatever he was photographing deserved his complete attention.
After he was gone, holding that camera sometimes felt like holding a piece of him.
That was why I didn’t lend it to anyone.
Not friends.
Not relatives.
Nobody.
Priya knew that.
She was my best friend, and she lived across the street from me.
We had been close long enough that she knew which boundaries I was flexible about and which ones weren’t negotiable.
The camera was one of the latter.
Still, before her weeklong trip to Portugal, she had asked if she could borrow it.
She wanted film photographs from the trip.