Dora arrived from the left while Hugo arrived from the right end of the street. They were about to greet each other in front of the building, when a man in a blue coat appeared and interrupted them with a rushed Afternoon! on his way to the entrance.

—Good evening! they replied in unison and tried to step aside, but by then, the man had passed and disappeared behind the heavy door.

Hugo cast a furtive glance at Dora, mumbled a short Hello and entered the building in front of her without adding more. The expression on his face had the the surprising warmth of the corridor into which they entered as it seemed to contradict his distant voice and abrupt movements. Climbing the stairs behind him, Dora began to speculate about what made him act so unusual, and wondered if it was about something connected with the envelope he was carrying.

They were around the third floor when suddenly the stairway darkened as the lights went off. Hugo was about to switch them back on, but he changed his mind immediately when Dora reached the same flight he was standing on. Her face was glowing in the orange light of the setting sun that shone through the windows of the upper floors. She looked sweeter than he ever saw her before. He thought about kissing her, but right then, the envelope fell from his hands and she leaned down to pick it up. He blushed. She imagined two rose petals emerge from a glass of milk, and then, not knowing anymore what to think, she handed the envelope back to him. He opened it, and with a clumsy gesture, he began to pull something out from it. A narrow strip of plastic unrolled onto a spring like shape which looked like the scale model of the dimly lit stairway. It was a film negative.

They leaned closer together and examined it. The negative was dark and they saw nothing but the windows of the stairway on it. They entered the flat and Dora had a closer look at the negative. Now, although still quite dark and predominantly orange, she was able to recognize the familiar interior of the room they were standing in. She looked startled. She held the negative towards the light and then, the vase of flowers, the dining table, the sofa, the bookshelf and everything else disappear from it. All that remained was a row of translucent orange rectangles.

Noticing her excitement, Hugo stepped closer and stared at the rectangles on the film for a few long moments… They seemed to be empty. Dora observed his face in the warm light cast on it through the film strip and she wanted to kiss him but she changed her mind when he quickly lowered the negative, opened the envelope and pulled out the prints with obvious curiosity. The photographs revealed a beautiful seascape of an intense blue color.

They were both surprised as it was hard to believe that these prints had anything in common with the film, and it took them some time to recall the day when they made an unplanned stop-over by the sea. Hugo remembered the dazzling sensation he felt when he peeked into the disposable camera and he could not tell at all where the sky ended or where the water begun. The whole landscape was merging together into an almost uniform color, and devoid of the horizon, the dimensions of the space appeared immeasurable. He compared the twelve frames from the film with the twelve photographs. He thought back of the pairs of equivalent colors he had learned about through the explanation given to him at the photography lab. Then he looked at Dora, and remembered that someone told him that: the images and their colors appear reversed on a film negative. Blue is orange. Orange is blue.

Meanwhile, Dora compared the photographs with the film as well. She recalled the street vendor on the beach with his cameras and his assumption according to which, the water was merely reflecting the sky from above and that in fact, the two things weren’t nearly as indistinguishable. Her thoughts led her back to the color wheel with the arrangement of opposite colors she studied at school a while ago. Then she saw Hugo turning towards her as if ready to tell her something or as if ready to ask her something. And finally she remembered too that, on a film negative, the images and their colors appear reversed. Blue is the opposite of orange. Orange is the opposite of blue.