Imagining a Photograph

When we're traveling, I post travel reports.  When we're not traveling, I make stuff up.  Like this.

An instant of light — a hundredth of a second, maybe more, perhaps less — is all it took to freeze forever that moment. Days months years pass, but I can hold the photograph in my hand, look again at the face looking at me, ponder that smile, wonder what happened to her.

I stare at the print, my eyes’ attention darting from center to edge and back, from detail to detail. From somewhere within my consciousness her smell comes to mind, uninvited yet not unwelcome, then the sound of her laugh, the feel of her shoulder, even the taste of her tongue. That moment so long ago, our laughter and happiness, the warmth of a spring sun, comes alive again. All the complexity of our world, our hopes and fears and expectations and the tension between what was and what would be, was distilled into these colors onto this small rectangle of paper.

That moment was followed by other moments not photographed. Spring turned into a scorching summer, laughter faded to tedium, and there was less feeling of shoulders and tasting of tongues. We endured thousands upon thousands of instants of light and even long bouts of darkness but none captured in a camera.

She smiles still, in that frozen moment. The mouth hasn’t yet voiced goodbye, the body hasn’t turned to walk away. I put the photograph away, back into the dusty box. The memories fade as quickly as they came and I return to the present, the now of years later, where she is long gone and mostly forgotten and entirely imaginary.