The Photograph
Click of the shutter, flash pop bang, life caught in a square of light, and isn’t that the miracle? The way she leans back in the chair, head thrown wild with laughter, hair spilling dark and endless, and you think, Yes, that’s her, that’s forever her, right there on glossy paper, tucked safe in the album. The photograph doesn’t bend, doesn’t slip, doesn’t forget — it keeps her young, keeps you both dizzy with the music of that night, cheap wine in plastic cups, jukebox humming something half-forgotten but alive in the way her hand found yours.
You can touch the photo, trace her outline, hold it up against the lamp and feel for a moment like you’ve beaten time at its own cruel game, like you’ve carved eternity into celluloid. Every picture is a promise: here we were, here we laughed, here we lived. A promise that memory alone can’t make.
The Memory
But photographs don’t breathe, don’t ache, don’t swell with the years. Memory does. Memory is the storm and the silence, the hot tub in a snowstorm, steam rising, kids throwing snowballs from the dark like mischievous angels, and her laughter cutting through it all like a blade of light. No photograph caught that, no shutter fast enough, no film wide enough to hold the way your chest burned with the thought: This is everything, this is all I need.
And memory, unlike photographs, shifts. It deepens, grows, takes on weight you didn’t know it had until the years rolled out like old film across the floor. What was once wild becomes holy. What was once ordinary becomes gift. And in the remembering you learn gratitude — for the chance, for the moment, for the love that came when you thought you’d missed it.
A photograph shows her smile. Memory lets you hear it. A photograph freezes her face. Memory lets her move, laugh, vanish, return. Photographs are proof. Memory is grace.
The Hope
And still there’s this tug, this quiet little drumbeat under the ribs, that says maybe it isn’t finished, maybe all these snapshots and snow-dusted memories are rehearsals for something still waiting in the wings. Maybe — just maybe — we two meet somewhere because the world is funny that way, circular, like the sax man who keeps winding back to the same riff but plays it different each time, softer, sweeter, deeper.
He tells himself not to count on it, not to spin fairy tales — but then again, wasn’t it always the unlikeliest moments that mattered most? The hot tub in a snowstorm, the cheap wine, a couple kids laughing at us laughing at ourselves. If those could happen, why not this? Why not the chance of turning a corner one spring afternoon, or Calamari Salad at the Mill House Brewing Company, being alive, and there she is — real, breathing, smiling like no time has passed at all.
And if it never happens, then fine — gratitude will be enough. But if it does… if the world decides to be kind just one more time — well, then the photograph will have its proof, the memory its echo, and he will have her again, not as before but as now, older, truer, maybe even better? Maybe not. We know some things don’t change. Some people don’t change. Some things are never meant to be, they are changing ever so slowly that we never notice anything, at all.
She lives in memory only. Like a black and white photograph, silvered with light, yellowed by time, mysterious, omnipresent, yet untouchable. Faint traces of her race one way, then back another, never truly there, never here. Never truly clear because memory fades quicker than time or photograph.
