ode to the SLR

it was old and battered, a pentax k-1000.
my sister passed it along when she upgraded to something sleeker.
it was manual everything, no automatic anything. i was in my early 20s, newly enthralled by the magic of darkrooms and images and the power to save what i loved enough to capture.
looking through that lens was how i came to understand what it means to truly focus. the rest of the world fell away as my eye tumbled into the object it had found.
all that mattered was the conversation we had without words: its beauty beamed like a lamp into my brain. my eye registered and clicked YES and zoomed in, closer and closer, then back a little, from fuzzy to sharp, distant to intimate, until it was framed just so.
then and only then did i press the shutter to save it.
the memory returned yesterday, when i was working on a short story i'd looked at too long to see properly -- so put away -- and only recently took out to try again.
it worked. but only after i turned off all distractions and looked deep into the thing through the lens of focus.
when i let the rest of the world fall away, i heard the tiny click of a new door opening inward.