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2. Aesthetically pleasing

Madara Uchiha loved to thrift.

That's me, by the way. I'm Madara. Sorry, I just like to speak of myself in third person sometimes, pretending I'm in a book. Anyhow, I loved to thrift, but in very specific shops. I wanted the shops to be quirky, retro, steampunk-like, where I could find the oddest things to decorate my apartment with.

I had just moved in. After having been in freelance for five years, I had finally been able to afford a small apartment.

Small was actually an overstatement. Small was an insult to actual small apartments. My apartment was microscopic. Only a room, with a kitchen in one corner and a bathroom where you couldn't get crucified, it was so small. But it was tidy and it was mine.

I hadn't room for a bed and a couch, so I had bought a lush sofa bed. I had covered the wooden floorboards in several oriental mats I had thrifted, and on the walls were posters of my favourite authors and bands and I had drowned the rest of the minimal wall space in mirrors fairy lights. Then, there was the cabinet with my three camera houses and five objectives, missing my telescopic objective that I had to store separately because it was so large. 

And now, some bits to fill in the spaces.

I cursed as I walked through the rainy cobble street, the storehouses on each side swallowing me up but the misery balanced out by the colourful shops at the bottom of each; books, scarves, souvenirs. Why had I decided hot chocolate in a paper mug was a good idea? I wanted to look aesthetically pleasing walking through the Christmas-lightened streets holding my thrifted goods with my aesthetic fucking hot chocolate but carrying all my bags while pretending to happily sip the hot chocolate was agony. Not to even speak of the fact that it prevented me from holding an umbrella, which would have been, you know, actually useful 

I stopped in one corner, putting my bags down. My red scarf blew around me in the wind; I was happy I had closed the buttons of my gingerbread-coloured coat. I downed the hot chocolate as fast as I believed I could without lessening the experience. It was good, with hints of cardamom and mint and a lot of cream. 

I sighed in relief as I tossed the paper mug in a bin and carried my bag with much greater ease home, looking far less aesthetically pleasing, alas.

Home was warm and cosy, still hazed with the scent of toast from this morning; eating just toast with butter was my guilty pleasure. I immediately stapled my things in their right places; a rough metal stool I had gotten half-price since you couldn't spin it, a huge hourglass to place on top, and a big looking glass on a pedestal for the little shelf next to the sofa bed.

I was incredibly pleased with my gatherings.

"One more thing!" I said out loud, not because I was a person who said things out loud but because I wanted to be one such person. "Or, rather, many other things."

The space was too small for a Christmas tree, but I had gotten a realistic-looking garland with berries for above the bed, as well as some glittery candy canes to thread on strings and hang around my posters and mirrors.

"There! That's this year's Christmas decoration done!"

Then, I went to the kitchen, heated up some of last night's noodles and sat down at my laptop to work.

Instagram was my main, or only, platform, where most people who found my webpage had first gone, and it was where I posted my best works and tried to be active and create engagement to the best of my abilities. Sometimes, people contacted me for a job they wanted done. Sometimes, I contacted people for a job I knew they wanted done. I would send them to my webpage, where they would check my prices, and then contact me again if they found them reasonable. 

But this day, four weeks before Christmas, I frowned as I saw the odd message. I had been contacted by the manager of a band. That had never happened before. 

I clicked to open the message...

And a whirlpool opened up underneath me and sucked my life into a whole new direction.

I had never taken photos of a band before, but the manager had contacted me because he had liked my crisp, industrial style, and he thought it would go well with his band.

I had never heard of the band before. They were called Morningowl, which I thought was pretty cute, and consisted of four members - singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer. I listened to one of their most popular songs, and figured it lay somewhere between indie pop and arena rock. Quite good, actually. 

They were a small band, with only a few thousand plays per song on Spotify, and played at clubs and bars from time to time. And I was asked to come to their performance this Saturday to shoot for their social media, which was also only Instagram just as me. From there, we would see where we would go.

I searched them up on Instagram, and saw, to my surprise, that I had more followers than them, This was probably more of a gain for them than for me, which had never been the case for a job before. They had very few posts, only five, with months between them. But even so, each photo was of incredible quality.

In the photos, I saw potential in this band. They seemed quite down-to-earth, no flashy scene clothes or gestures. The lead singer, someone called Hashirama Senju, had what I could only describe as a bowl cut, but it was a nice chestnut brown. He always seemed to perform in T-shirts and jeans. The bassist was his brother, Tobirama, and he was a copy of Hashirama except without the bowl cut and without the colour; he had albinism. He always seemed to wear the same black polo and black trousers, enhancing his short, white hair, and a pair of high-ankle Adidas shoes that looked incredible on him. The drummer was a muscular black man with dreadlocks he pulled back in hairbands, and the guitarist was a very proper-looking Asian man that I would never have guessed played in a band. 

I liked them. I could definitely help them with not only photos but also marketing and the digital parts.

If they liked me as a photographer.

And as a person.