The Eslie rule

I have a rule that I did not decide on so much as accumulate: any place worth going is worth going with someone who will take the picture.

Not someone who takes a picture. Someone who takes the picture — who stops on the wrong side of a plaza, in traffic, in a good coat, and says no, come back, the light is doing something. That person is Eslie. She has been that person for years now, and I have stopped pretending it is a coincidence that every day I remember in detail is a day she was in.

What she actually is

People meet Eslie and say model, which is true and is the least interesting true thing. She is posh in a way that is entirely invented and completely convincing — she can hold a paper cup of matcha like it was issued to her by a minor European royal family. She is also, and I need this on the record, one of the funniest people alive. Deadpan. Devastating. Will pay you a compliment so specific it reorganises your week.

And she is soulful in a way that sneaks up on you. You are three courses into a lunch that was supposed to be forty-five minutes, and she asks you a question about your life that nobody has thought to ask you in a year, and then she waits. That is the part people miss. She waits for the answer.

The shoot

Here is the thing about doing photos with your best friend: nothing about it is professional and all of it is serious.

We block out an afternoon. One of us has an idea, usually an idea that is really just one item of clothing with an entire personality attached to it — a headscarf, a sun pendant the size of a saucer, a green checked blazer. We get dressed in a room that looks like a charity shop exploded. Somebody says is this too much, and somebody else says it's not enough yet, and then we go outside and stand against a wall that we have both, separately, been thinking about for a month.

She directs. I would like to say we collaborate, and we do, and she directs. She has an eye for the half-second before a face settles into what it thinks it should look like, and she will take forty photographs to get it. Thirty-nine are unusable. One of them is the best picture anybody has ever taken of me.

A good photograph of you is not one where you look good. It is one where you look like yourself on your best day, which is a much rarer event and much harder to catch.

Lunch, which is not about lunch

We get lunch constantly, and the food is beside the point, which is a strange sentence for me to publish on this blog.

The ritual: iced coffee for her, whatever is green for me, or the reverse, we are not consistent people. A table outside if there is one. Two hours, minimum. A ten-minute stretch where neither of us says anything because a dog has walked past and we both need to process it.

Then the park. Then a blanket. Then her flat on her back explaining the entire emotional architecture of something that happened to her in March, while I take notes I will never look at again.

The travelling

We travel like we are being followed by a very slow film crew.

Tossa was the high point. Sea the colour of something you would accuse a photograph of faking. We climbed up to the old walls and stayed too long for the light — her idea — and got the picture I will be showing people when I am eighty. Then the beach the next morning, sun already brutal by ten, her in the yellow bikini and the white sunglasses, me overdressed as a lifestyle choice.

And then the part of traveling that nobody puts in the montage: the hotel room at eleven at night, both of us flat on our backs in sheet masks, looking like two extremely relaxed ghosts. You cannot really talk in a sheet mask. It turns out that is when we say the true things.

The others

Occasionally the circle widens. Nora turns up and the volume goes up four notches — there is a photo outside a bar in the Gothic Quarter where I am pulling a face in the back like a man who has just remembered something, and it is one of my favourite pictures of the three of us. Cielo appears, moustache first, and suddenly it is a whole afternoon of pearls and hair clips and nobody leaving the kitchen.

But it is a widening. The centre of it is still the two of us, deciding something is worth doing and then doing it enormously.

A poem, which she did not ask for

She has never asked me for anything, which is its own kind of demand. So.

For Eslie, who always takes the picture

You do not pose. You agree to be seen,
which is harder, and you do it
in a green blazer on a wet cobblestone
as if the street were built to hold you up.

I have watched a whole plaza turn
to get you in the frame.
I have been the plaza.

Nobody photographs the twenty minutes before —
you deciding against the gold earrings,
me lying about the time,
both of us lying about the time.

The sea at four o'clock. You said
we should stay for the light.
The light came. Obedient. On cue.
I have never known you to be wrong about light.

And after: two ghosts in a hotel bed,
faces too wet to argue,
telling the truth for fifteen minutes
because the mask says fifteen minutes.

Friend — I want no beautiful life
that you are not also standing in.
Bring the camera. I'll bring the stickers.
We'll put the day somewhere it can't get out.

The point

The rule has held for years now, and I have tested it in several countries. Go with the person who will make you stop for the light. Go with the person who waits for the answer. Go with the person who, when you say is this too much, says not yet.

I have one of those. Her name is Eslie.

Green ones first, always — but she gets the first green one.