August 14, 2026
← All entriesA man ran for a bus that had already left, and for one frame the whole street ran with him.
I wasn't chasing anything in particular that evening. The rain had started twenty minutes earlier, the kind that doesn't announce itself, just thickens until the sidewalk turns into a mirror.
He came around the corner at a dead sprint, coat flapping, and behind him the taillights of the 8th Avenue bus were already smearing red across the wet asphalt. I had maybe half a second. No time to check exposure, no time to think about the rule of thirds.
What I got instead was closer to a feeling than a photograph — motion blur on his legs, everything else frozen, the neon sign of a bodega bleeding into the puddle at his feet. He didn't catch the bus. I found out later he waited forty minutes for the next one, standing under an awning, laughing about it on the phone with someone.
That's the part I keep thinking about. The photograph shows the loss. The forty minutes after it shows he didn't mind losing.