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When she first stumbles across the old camera at the back of her sock drawer it makes her chest ache and her eyes water. Jimmy had always been joking that he was going to teach her to see the world through a lens. She'd laughed at him and told him she was perfectly capable of using a camera, but he just kept saying that work and album shots weren't proper art, and he was going to teach her the proper ways of the camera. Then suddenly he was off seeing the world through his lens and she wasn't, and suddenly Chloe felt like a scuffed up old camera was all she had left of him.
Which is silly, she scolds herself and fiddles with the camera settings, checking the film and absentmindedly running her fingers along the back of the drawer in search of the spare canister. It's not like Jimmy is never coming back.
She examines her own loneliness in her bureau mirror and half-heartedly lifts up the camera to take a picture.
The next day, in a fit of frustrated melancholy, Chloe treats herself to a day all about herself. She primps and relaxes and balances the loneliness of the previous day by using up the rest of the film roll in silly ways. First she does close ups of the flowers outside the Talon; then she trades in the silliness for a small dose of stupidity and drives one-handed so she can take pictures of herself with the window down and her hair flying in her face, and wriggles through the fence at Saunder's Gorge and sets up a precarious shot of feet dangling out over the drop.
She feels kind of nauseous but exhilarated by the time she carefully climbs back over to the right side of the fence.
The first time Chloe wakes up back in hospital, all she barely manages to croak out is a request for water and her camera, but thankfully Lois seems to be hovering and her fading voice doesn't fall on an empty room. Chloe vaguely registers relief at Lois' presence, though she can't quite pinpoint why, before she sinks back into unconsciousness.
Chloe doesn't know how long she drifts in and out for, but when she wakes up it's dark outside and there's no one by her beside except for a familiar looking camera with a big scratch down the side. There's also an assortment of her things amongst the usual flowers and cards, and she ponders aloud how many kinds of messed up it is that waking up to get well cards on a hospital bedside could ever be normal.
She flicks the bedside light on and lets everything come rushing back, and relives the sweet relief of seeing Lois alive and well.
When Chloe notices the light reflecting on her bedside monitors, turning them into mirrors, she rummages on the table until she pulls out a lipstick. Thanks, Lois. She scrawls oops and a smiley face on the glass front of a monitor, and takes a picture of her happy-tired smile reflecting underneath it.
The first thing Chloe does when she wakes again in the morning is carefully take a picture of Lois' matching smile.
When she finally manages to evade Nurse Lois' clutches, Chloe retreats to the Kent farm. She racks up an impressive number of shots of Clark obligingly doing farm work at human speed, and when she's nearly finished the roll she just sighs happily and watches him zip around some more.
This is nice she thinks, and ponders why no one else seems to find the same value in Clark that she does. He's the only one since her release from hospital who has let her stay quietly in the background, yearning for companionship but not the heart to heart about why she's yearning.
For the final shot of the roll she sets the camera on auto and rushes into position to exaggeratedly heave at one of the bales Clark has been tossing around so effortlessly, and after the flash goes off, Clark gently tackles her into a pile of hay in retaliation. She's out of film, but Chloe carefully fixes a picture of them laughing in her mind instead.
Later that day she gets all deep and meaningful with her photo album, and marvels over how quietly someone can be gone so fast that you can't even get a final photo of them. It occurs to her that the closest she can now come of a photo of herself and her best friend is to take a picture of herself with a picture, and then she cries.
It's not until the very morning Jimmy's flight arrives that Chloe finally brings herself to drop her film off for development. She meets him at Metropolis Domestic with a big stack of fuzzy, ill-framed photographs of herself and her friends, but mainly herself. He laughs and kisses her and calls her his girl, and promises to help her pick out a decent digital camera for her to keep practising on.