The Chair Beside Her

I would not have gone out to photograph this morning if it had not been for the person sitting in the chair.

The chair beside her is mine.

There are people who enter your life loudly, and there are others who become part of its architecture.

We have known each other since 2008. Over the years, our lives crossed in different places and at different times. She spent a week with me in Argentina, and I traveled to Colombia to see her. There was a time when I believed I could marry her.

But I never took that final step.

She has always been direct with me—honest, sometimes sharper than necessary, and never particularly interested in softening something she believed needed to be said. I used to tell her that speaking her mind so freely could sometimes get her into trouble. She knew that. She accepted it.

With me, however, I understood the purpose behind it. Her honesty was rarely careless. It came from concern. She wanted the best for me, even during times when I was not always certain what the best version of myself looked like.

For years, I carried an image of myself as a candle sitting in front of an open window. A flame can appear steady while still being vulnerable to the smallest change in the wind. She was often the person who came along and closed the window so the wind would not extinguish the flame.

Years later, when she came to Miami for a seminar, she called to let me know she would be there. I drove down, and she spent the weekend with me. There was a familiarity between us that felt natural and comfortable, almost like stepping briefly into a life that might once have been possible.

We spoke about many things, but never fully answered why we had never moved forward into a committed relationship.

This time, she noticed something different about me.

I was quieter. More relaxed. Calmer than she remembered.

I explained that I had become comfortable with the person I had become. There was no urgency anymore. No feeling that I needed to chase something simply because it might disappear if I waited too long.

That morning at the beach felt unusually natural.

I sat beside someone who had been part of my life for many years and watched the day begin.

Later, when I looked at the photograph, I noticed the chair.

My chair.

Empty.

It seemed almost too perfect.

Perhaps that had always been the shape of our relationship. A part of me was there beside her, while another part of me remained somewhere outside the frame.

Not absent.

Not gone.

Just never completely seated.

The Chair Beside Her is built around a simple visual relationship: one occupied chair and one empty chair facing the same horizon.

The figures are small within the frame, while the illuminated cloud field dominates the upper portion of the composition. This scale places the relationship between the chairs within a much larger landscape and allows the scene to remain open rather than explanatory.

The empty chair is particularly important. It identifies a second presence without showing that person directly, creating a visual tension between presence and absence.

The photograph functions both as a coastal sunrise and as a record of shared space.

An empty chair can mean many things.

Sometimes it represents loss. Sometimes expectation. Sometimes the possibility that someone may return.

In this photograph, I think it represents something more difficult to name:

presence without surrender.

I was there that morning. I remember the ocean, the changing sky, the conversation, and the ease of sitting beside someone who had known several versions of me.

Yet the photograph shows her seated and my chair empty.

Perhaps that is the most accurate portrait of us I could have made.

For years there had been affection, trust, history, and the suggestion of another life that might have existed. But possibility and commitment are not the same thing.

You can stand very close to a doorway without ever walking through it.

Maybe some relationships are meant to become exactly that—not failures and not unfinished stories, but two lives that touched deeply without becoming one life.

There was a time when I might have looked at that empty chair and wondered what I had missed.

Today I see something different.

I see the person I was, the person I might have become, and the person who eventually learned that peace does not always come from choosing every road that once appeared possible.

Sometimes peace comes from understanding why you did not.

The chair is empty.

But I was there.

This photograph belongs to Francisco Colón's ongoing examination of memory, connection, and the meaning carried by ordinary objects within personal experience.

The two chairs function as visual stand-ins for a relationship extending across years and locations. One is occupied; the other indicates the photographer's presence outside the frame.

Rather than presenting the relationship directly, the image allows a familiar beach object to carry the narrative. The surrounding sunrise provides scale, atmosphere, and a sense of time passing beyond the two figures.