Quang Tran about 1300 words
1401 South Summerlin Ave.
407-453-3363
Tranq17@trinityprep.org

Life through a camera lens is different to real life. The camera lens sees things differently. We can portray our lives through a camera lens in any way we choose.
Melody discovered the magic of the camera. Every day, she’d take pictures of herself with someone new, posing as if they were a friend. She’d go somewhere and take pictures as if she were on holiday. Her pictures showed a life she didn’t have. A life she wanted to have.
Melody had died her hair a dark red to show the camera the changes in her life. Melody now wore a strapless short black dress when only a few weeks ago she wore an ACDC band t-shirt. She wanted to show the camera how she had changed. Her life was in the camera, while reality was on a stand-still.
“I regret giving her that camera” Her mother had said to her father one day. They didn’t know Melody was sitting in the room next door, taking the camera to pieces and putting it all back together again, over and over again. “She’s obsessing over it too much. She has it with her all the time! It’s silly how teenagers feel they have to document every part of their lives nowadays!” Her mother liked to go on rants about this and that. It made her feel like she was getting her say in the world, even if her say really didn’t make any difference. Her husband usually listened to her but not this time. And that was his mistake. He believed that Melody was just being a normal teenager and his wife was fretting too much.
Melody’s friends found the camera intriguing at first. They liked to take pictures with her. That is, until she confused them. She wanted to take pictures of things that weren’t happening. She wanted to pretend they were happening. Her friends rapidly turned away from her, with a nagging fear in their stomachs about her mental health and a warning in the back of their minds to stay well clear.
And so they did. Melody lost her friends at school but she didn’t mind. She had her life in her camera. She told herself it was real. How could you capture something unreal? She could prove she had lots of friends. She could prove it because she had pictures with them on her camera. Okay, granted, they weren’t always sitting beside her – in fact, they tended to be studying in the background or chatting to someone else but you know how it is with people – they’re always distracted!
Melody’s Mum was informed by a worried teacher that Melody had no friends at school. She was confused. Melody always talked of her many friends when they got back from school...how they’d taken fun pictures of their day! But Melody would never show her pictures. She said, her mum didn’t need to know every single bit about her life! She was a teenager after all! She needed her privacy!
When Melody stopped going to school, she became friends with her therapist who loved to take pictures with her. With less people around, Melody decided to document the new objects she’d obtained in her life. She’d go out into town especially, taking pictures of her friends walking in the back ground, and she would buy something new to document. Her life was always changing, you see. And she wanted to remember how it was always changing.
Sometimes she'd go out into town on her own and make new friends. She'd show her camera her new friends since it was the only person who was interested. A friend of her mums saw her once. Her mum got worried and told her to stay away from strangers but Melody was a teenager. It was in her nature to disobey her parents once in a while.
She was a teenager and she was going through those precious life-changing moments. Everyone goes through them. They only last for a few years. They change who you are and Melody believed that they were extremely important. They definitely needed documenting.
Melody never doubted herself and she was happy about that. She thought it was weak in a person to