Old Friends, 2010 - Pt. 1

In accordance to my vow to be more honest about myself online this year, I’ve decided to post more intimate images and tell stories of experiences I have documented over the years. I’ve desperately shied away from letting anything about my personal life be shared online, but I figure in this closed-off, subscriber-only forum it should be fine.

With the death of Prince this week, I remembered these photos to which his music was the background soundtrack to, and when I asked my friend Sara if I could share these images and our story, she responded with an expected “hell yeah, go for it!”

It was the summer of 2010 and I was visiting some old friends from my college days up in Seattle when I was glad to get a response from Sara, someone I hadn’t heard from in years. On a whim I had sent her an email before I arrived, hoping we could hang out and maybe catch up over a drink. I wasn’t even sure if the ancient Earthlink email address I had for her was still in use, since that platform seemed older than my dreams of becoming the next John Byrne.

But Sara thankfully did receive the message and seemed eager to reconnect, offering for me to meet with her on her apartment in the U-District and saying we could walk to a bar from there.

Sara and I had enjoyed a very brief sexual encounter the last week I lived in Seattle almost a decade previously, and though we’d lost touch over the years, we both had retained a strong affinity for each other. It turned out that she’d also been following along with my photography career for the last few years and was proud of what I had accomplished up to that time.

She was just as cute as ever, with her dorky, hilarious way of telling stories and not caring about how she was perceived by the world around her. We sat in her tiny place for over two hours sipping whiskey, catching up, and sharing remembrances of old times as I clicked away with candid shots of her. She finally mentioned in a flirty tone that it was time that she should get a personal photo shoot of her own, and excited to see where this might be headed, I told her I was open to any ideas she might have.

It wasn’t long before she was stripping off her pants, dancing around her tiny living room to Prince’s “Kiss” while I happily clicked away, giving her subtle directions that she didn’t need.