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| Monday, January 17, 2005 02:27 PM |
| Cause I won't remember |
| by poppy |
I just went through my box of pictures. I'm not a big picture person; I hate being in them usually, and most of the times that I see something I would want a photographic memory of are not times when whipping out a camera would be appropriate. I used to be quite the shutter bug though, as my photo box can attest to. It's funny to flip forward through the years and see my gradual weaning; I started to take more and more pictures without people in them, or at least without people in them who realized they were getting their picture taken. I had gone to Germany one summer, and was showing my pictures to my boyfriend's boss. Most of them were of fountains and gate posts and sky. She told me later that she had thought I was a drugged out hippie prior to seeing those; the lack of beer-hoisting photos made her think better of me.
There was perhaps some truth to her assessment though; perhaps I stopped taking pictures of myself when there was enough incriminating evidence around to preclude a Senate run in the future. I was less sensitive than shrewd. Nevertheless, I didn't really get away from the posed shots until after college. I've pretty much kicked the habit, as evidenced by our honeymoon photos; an old friend said they would be more interesting if we were in some of them. I wonder if they would be. I was there; I remember being there. I have no need to prove to a third party that I was there. What purpose would a shot of me in front of the Capitol really serve?
This line of thinking and subsequent box searching all started when I was seized with a need to find a particular picture of a particular friend. She died last year, suddenly and tragically. At our volunteer workshop today she came into my mind, and I thought she really would have liked to have been there. It was her kind of thing. When I think of her it is always as she was in a picture I took at our college's Winter Ball six years ago: pressed cheek to cheek with someone, face shining, fabric choker cutting right above the collar bones. She is radiant there, as she always was, in a smoky, smoldering sort of way. Beautifully exotic, she was proud of her self-proclaimed strangest-of-all-ethnicities: Puerto Rican and Jewish. In the picture her red hair is pulled back, and her eyes are smiling. The only thing is, I can't find the picture. As I'm not so much of a photo person I keep everything in one box, and as hard as I willed it did not appear.
I think it upsets me most that I can't remember who else is in the picture, whose cheek hers was pressed next to. Was it me? I don't think so. There's a long list of people who would have gladly gone cheek-to-cheek with her; everyone adored her. That I can't remember makes me scared that it is fading, that one day I might not be able to remember the dress she was wearing, or the way she wore her hair. I wonder again what difference it makes; we were there, I remember being there. Snapshots seem to stay with me longer than motion: ask me to picture feanor, and I think of a picture I took of him on our first vacation, him standing in the rain grinning. I will not picture him as he looked making dinner, as he looked making bread with me 15 minutes ago, as he looks when we are doing laundry. I have fixated on that image because it speaks to me of who he is and why I love him. My friend, smoldering and sexy and beautiful and (most importantly) happy stays behind my eyes, lives there, in a picture whose physical copy may not exist. Hopefully that will be enough. |
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