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When you release the shutter to take the photograph, light reacts with the silver-halide particles in the film emulsion. Until the film is developed, it will be an invisible reaction, and so she floats there, her image captured in darkness.

I make lists to remember.

1. Marginalia. She used to sit at the desk next to mine in the darkened lecture theatre as the professor ran images through the slide projector - Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns, the caryatids of the Erechtheion. Sometimes she would reach over and draw in the margins of my notebook: Spirals reminiscent of Klimt. Eyes. Calculations of how many Drachma we would need to travel through the Greek Islands. Cryptic messages, written in the International Phonetic Alphabet we learned in linguistics, when the lecture was dull: | šut mi| .

2. What we shared. A ten by twelve foot dorm room smelling faintly of mildew and disinfectant, that we despised. A collage of black and white photographs of faces she'd snapped in the street, each one enlarged and cropped close so that their eyes, their cheekbones, filled the frame. Meals of pistachio nuts and diet Coke. An electric kettle we would fill from the tap in the bathroom and boil to make Lipton instant noodles and cups of jasmine tea. A black cardigan with a hole in the left sleeve. My second-hand cassette player that couldn't rewind. Her tapes of Van Morrison. A bicycle pump. A sense of despair, that we had so little time.

3. Injuries. A minute dent I can still trace on the ridge of my nose, sustained when we crashed our bikes head-on as we cycled home from a late-night screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. A scraped knee. Two hairline fractures on her left arm and a cracked rib. I think she called out to me, or I to her, and we each turned in a wide, slow, graceful arc directly towards the other, colliding at the corner of University and West Mall. For some inexplicable reason, neither of us able to swerve out of the way.
   
   At first, I seemed to be the injured one, blood pouring out of my nose, a black gash under one eye. She wheeled both bikes home, balancing one with each arm, patient as I limped slowly along beside her. Inside, she helped me rinse the blood out of my clothes and put me to bed. Before she turned out the lights she placed one cool hand on my forehead and it seemed for a moment to still the pain. But she came to me later, in the middle of the night, pulling me out of the dark, out of a dream in which I wandered blind through a labyrinth, inching forward with arms outstretched, afraid I would smash into a wall - "I think my arm is broken."
   
   No moon that night. Lucid, luminous details return to me, intensified by the constant dull throb of pain in my head, and the sudden plunge out of sleep. I can still feel the skin taut on my knee where the blood had dried. I remember the damp grass soaking into my sneakers and a shower of icy raindrops as I tore off a handful of sumac from a hedge outside the dorm. It must have rained in the night, while I slept. We walked across the empty campus, along the tiled path that runs through the geology building and the small observatory, slipping between the sulphurous pools of light along the mall. There were stars overhead, glittering through the bare tree branches. Orion, Cassiopeia.
   
   In the emergency room a nurse filled in a chart and led her away. I sat in a hard, plastic chair and waited. A radio played quietly in the background, country and western. She came back two hours later, her arm tightly bound in a white cloth sling. Grinning, she held out her wrist to show me the plastic ID bracelet fastened there with a metal clip, spelling out my name in smudged purple letters, identified as female, blood type B negative, age 17.
   
   "He let me keep the x-ray of my arm." Euphoric. "That's why it took so long. They had to find a technician."
   
   "Does it hurt?"
   
   "I can't feel a thing." She shook the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given her like a castanet as we retraced our path, the world filling in now as the dawn light grew, clumps of emerald moss between cracks in the tile, the round dome of the observatory. Students passed us heading for their 8:30 lectures, and I wondered if they could see us, if we walked invisible through an overlapping universe, jarred out of focus when we crashed into one another in the night. She bent down to pick up a worm stretched out swollen and purple on the asphalt and placed it gently in the soil. Back in our room she asked me to tape the x-ray to the window. Radius. Ulna. Fine striations, our collision etched in the bone.

4. A ferry trip to Galiano on the Queen of Nanaimo. In the cafeteria, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth resplendent in blue cape, diamond-encrusted tiara, wristwatch. The Sunshine Breakfast - two scoops of reconstituted egg garnished with a slice of orange. A woman riding her bicycle off the ferry at Mayne, carrying in a carton strapped to her fender giant bunches of lychees and lavender, a tiny tortoise-shelled cat. The scent of lavender that enveloped us as she wobbled past. Lying together at the edge of a rock pool set deep in the sandstone, a dark astronomical lens peering back through time.

5. A typology of stone. The night before her term paper was due. She stood in the centre of our room surrounded by hand-drawn diagrams, lab-reports, the photographs from Galiano, trying to piece them together.
   
   "I don't think I can do this." She looked up at me, then crouched down awkwardly, her arm still in a sling, to pick up a cross-section, leaving a gap of worn carpet in the paper mosaic. I had propped the window open with a dictionary and the breeze smelled faintly of the sea; it rippled through the pages bleached of colour in the dim light. I could see her face reflected in the mirror above her desk, concentrating, biting her lower lip.
   
   Her father had insisted she take geology as a minor, something to fall back on, the gravitas of stone. And she attended every lecture, getting up at seven in the dark winter mornings when I only wanted to lie in bed, deep under the covers in a cave of warmth, catching sometimes a glimpse of her as she opened the door into the hall, dressed in her brown corduroys, ragged at the hems and just an inch short so that her socks always showed, her cloth knapsack crammed with books and slung across her navy wool jacket. Then I would fall asleep, waking again when she returned, her face bright from cycling through the cool morning air.
   
   She took detailed, elaborate notes, carefully wrote up each lab, spent hours sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, studying the 600-page textbook. Once she showed me a Burgessia bella, a dark round body with a skinny whip-like tail, embedded in grey stone. "My professor says it's exclusive to the Burgess Shale in British Columbia - 530 million years old. It swam along the bottom of the sea. And then one day it sank into the sediment and died. Isn't it strange, that I can hold it here now, in my hand? It looks like a shadow burned into the rock. Somehow it survived." She was especially interested in trace fossils - not the remnants of the animal but some record of its movement, burrowings, tracks, the imprint of a body, captured by a pocket of clay or mud and then baked hard by the sun or buried under layers of moss. It wasn't the discovery that interested her, whether by accident or erosion, more the knowledge of it lying there in the darkness, tremulous, secret. In fact, I think the idea of it being uncovered upset her, the earth sliced open by a sharp metal blade revealing the imprint, the exposure of something that should remain silent and numinous. It was better left sealed in the stone matrix, protected by thick layers of soil and clay.
   
   "I don't think I can do this." She studied the cross-section, passed it to me, bent down again and reorganized a series of photographs. I looked at my watch - past midnight; panic had set in. It was always like this with her, panic needing to reach a certain critical mass, engulfing her, carrying me along with it, before the words came, still tortuous and slow. She preferred working sensuously, by eye, by touch. She couldn't sit still but needed to rearrange the pages of notes, feel the rock samples in her hands, scratch them with her fingernail, a penny, a nail, even taste them as if she could swallow their essence, her body always in contact with the hard surfaces.
   
   It took all night; I sat cross-legged on the bed with her electric Smith-Corona on my lap and typed up the report as she dictated it to me, whiting out corrections, interleaving the typed pages with figures, glossy photographs. I ran out of typewriter paper on page 17 and had to make do with green-tinged sheets ripped out of her sketchbook. It came to sixty-two pages, "A Geological Profile of Galiano Island," a patch-work report fastened by a large clip. She asked me to type all the names in red capitals, twice over so that they stood out sharply - SHALE LIMESTONE MICA QUARTZ. I remember the feel of their imprint as I ran my fingers across each completed page, garnet inclusions in a metamorphic rock.

6. Postcards she sent me over the Christmas break, from her home in San Francisco. Gandhi in a loin cloth, staring out between the spokes of a spinning wheel. A black and white photograph from Life Magazine of a nuclear test, "Cloud rises seven miles from observers, Yucca Flat, Nevada, 1953." A Georgia O'Keefe print of a patch of sky seen through the hollow of a pelvic bone bleached white in the sun.

7. An agate marble that shone a dusky silver-red, the cracked blade of a pocket knife, the ID bracelet from the hospital, five or six rings she often wore. She had been assigned a self-portrait in her studio class. She took a wire coat hanger and undid one end, twisting it into a spiral, then hung these objects from it with varying lengths of string. Her instructor gave her a C+, saying the sculpture was too abstract, lacked feeling, it was only a cage. But I found it beautiful, ethereal. It had a certain asymmetry to the eye, yet every part balanced perfectly. I hung it in the window and would watch from my bed as it spun gently in the breeze, a kind of armature, netting her heart as the dull metals caught the light.

8. Someone drinking tea at the table next to mine, scent of jasmine. A cover at the Starfish Room, vaguely familiar, disguised at first by the unusual rhythm but the words seeping in, Well it's a marvelous night for a Moondance, With the stars up above in your eyes... A certain quality of light, granular and blue, at dusk, when there's been a heavy rain. What sneaks up on me when I'm least expecting, catches my breath, catches me unaware.

9. Her photographs. The faces like stone koré, floating above the blue afghan on her bed. Photographs of rock pools at Galiano, always with my sneaker or my hand along the rim for scale. The series she called, "Camera Obscura." This involved photographing round objects in square containers, or square objects in round containers (How, Aristotle asked, can the sun make a circular image through a square hole?), or in making her body look like what it wasn't - an arum lily, a marble column.
   
   A day in late January, a grey, cold day, everything slightly damp. She took me down to the old World War Two towers on the beach below the cliffs at the university. We climbed through the hollowed out cliff path, searching for toe-holds in the wooden steps and overgrown roots, coming out at the base of one of the towers. It rose two stories high, the upper storey with a large rectangular gash like a blind eye carved into it where the searchlight would have shone out across the water. She stripped naked and asked me to photograph her. Lying on the sand draped in seaweed. Peering through a hollowed out log. We found a metal ladder screwed to the interior curving wall of the tower, and climbed from the dark urine stench below up through a small square cut into the concrete, up onto the wind-filled platform. She balanced there, a white fragile body on the ledge of the tower's dark eye, her arms raised so that she appeared to hold up the flat roof - a caryatid. A photograph taken from above as she clung to the ladder, her sharp face and skinny shoulder emerging through the square. After an hour, shivering with cold, she had to stop and get dressed. We sat huddled together on the platform below the gash in the wall as protection from the wind and drank from a thermos of tea. I draped a small wool blanket over our knees and slowly a little warmth came. I tasted salt on my lips. Waves echoed in the stone hollow, entered the spaces between words. For a time I couldn't tell my body from hers.
   
   I would have stayed there, enduring the discomfort, damp seeping in at the small of our backs, curling up in the bone. She shifted her weight and separated from me, the cold air falling between us. "Look at my skin - it's blue," she said, and laughing, held her hands out to show me. She stood up, her feet still bare, cracked and bleeding a little from the crushed shells on the beach, to spin around and around with a kind of heavy grace on the concrete floor, then ran across to the far wall and pressed herself, her palms and her cheeks, against the graffiti. This is what I most remember. An ability to metamorphose, to sink into her environment, to embrace it, smudges of ink or clay on her hands, her cheekbone. Pressed against the curved wall of the tower. Maybe her trace is there still.
   
   I would have stayed there with her. She pulled me up and we both leaned out over the ledge, reaching out our hands to catch the drops of rain just starting to fall. Beyond us the opaque green sea.
   
   "I'm going to invoke the spirits of the ocean to keep us here now - I'll offer my body as libation -" I tried to hold her back but she pulled away and raced to the metal ladder, climbed down, and ran out across the sand, shouting, "Oh spirits of the wide green ocean!" I followed her down to the edge of the water but stopped as she plunged in and let the waves and the seafoam pour over her. I don't know how we got home.
   
   She told me later that none of the photographs turned out. And then, even later, that she had lost the film.

10. What is left behind. A taste for pistachio nuts at odd hours. A paperback I'd lent her on Zen Buddhism, boldly underlined in blue. A surprising knowledge of marine geology. Her tapes of Van Morrison. Memory hollowed by time.

When the film is finally unwound in the red light of the dark room and dipped in the chemical bath, the exposed silver-halide particles turn into silver, a black metal. The dark areas in the released image carry the least trace of silver and appear transparent while the light areas appear opaque. The image is transferred from the negative to a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper. As the transferred image is dipped once again in the chemical bath, the areas of darkness and light are reversed. She appears slowly before your eyes: a sharp face peering up at you, her skinny shoulders, luminescent, shining out of the dark square, as if her image has been captured at the moment of birth. The Mohists (after the philosopher Mo Ti, 470-391 B.C.E.) knew and taught that objects reflect light, and called this effect, "shining forth."