The thing about Mona's photoshoot is that it went so seamlessly right up until the end that it was almost too easy. I met her at Towson University where she'd graduated the years before. She didn't get to have grad pics last year because...#covid...so this was her photoshoot debut. She was radiant, confident, and had great shot ideas to pair with the ones I had for her. We shot outside with the Towson tiger and inside Stephens Hall where she had so many memories.
She told me her path to graduation had been a complex one, not a simple four years equals a degree kind of experience. But here she was: an already gainfully employed and confident grad. At the end of the shoot (which went over because we were both loving how it was going so much) we gathered our things and started saying goodbyes. Then, semi-frantically rummaging through her purse and tote bag she said:
Wait. I can't find my phone.
It’s petty in the big scheme of things but we all know the feeling. You feel at best lost and at worst like you’ve lost a limb. After an hour and half of searching bathrooms, hallways, under benches, under mulch, beside the tiger, among the flowers, along the steps, in the lost and found, and after calling the campus police to report a missing iPhone, we came up empty handed.
No.
Phone.
It was very mysterious because she had called me on it one hour before when we coordinated to meet up on campus. Mona kept saying, “I don't feel like it's stolen....I feel like someone turned it in somehow. I'm just not sensing it got stolen.”
And I felt the same way. We both had this sort of profound moment of faith in humanity that some stray student or grad hadn't nabbed.
Staying by her side in the bizarre modern crisis of losing a phone, aka limb, we failed. We couldn't find it or learn any more info about its whereabouts with "find my iphone" and all the tools available. We said goodbye and wished for Karma to be on her side.
Two days later I got an email from Mona. “They found my phone!!” she wrote/screamed. A student had turned it into the Dean's office that afternoon. While we were inside photo-ing a kind Towson soul found a phone in the mulch and walked it immediately to the Dean’s office lost and found.
And there it was: proof. Proof that intuition was right. Proof that staying calm helps. Proof that humans do kind things. Of course they do. Ask about my summer and fall sessions! mollyemiller.com
