Dear Mama,
There is so much I don’t remember.
I am screaming with laughter.
Once upon a time, people took photos on old cameras, winding the film after each click. The cameras lived on, but film was fragile. Light could destroy the image. Enough sunlight could destroy the film itself. Click and move on, wind up the memory, capture the next. No preview. No review. No checking for weird smiles or twitching eyes. Say cheese, click, wind, repeat.
I will ask your daughter who snapped the photo and when, but right now I don’t care. I care that you can hear me in it. There’s a gurgle in the laugh, something wet and delicious, that sweet spit smell that only babies have, and only before they begin eating solid food. There’s the accordion crinkle of my eyes. I am not afraid. I am not startled. You dangle me in the air with the confidence of generations and, young as I am, something in me recognizes the expertise in your nails gripping tight to my sides.
The best part of all? You are smiling.
Someone caught you in a quiet moment, not sifting through tasks or schedules or responsibilities. Someone caught you and me having a conversation with our faces inches from each other. Someone caught us having a ball!
I don’t remember.
When you visit me later, after years, after lifetimes, I will wonder: What is the magic of remembering it all? We have cameras now that keep the photo, let you see it as it is being taken, let you stage the gaff, the joy, the joke, the calm repose. No click and rewind. Just click and review, redo, rehash, and revise. Reshape the present. Reframe the past. Reap the future. Keep it all, keep every file, keep every square, and, maybe, let some pattern bot sort your life out for you in exchange for a tall glass of water. Re, re, re, re, re-everything except remember.
Once upon a time, Mama, I might have mourned the photos I never took. Now, I mourn the grief I cannot express because for all of the replication and revision I still suspect that a photo is only a photo, is not the moment. I mourn for a present that I cannot feel, too busy clocking time in the past and future at once.
I wonder at finding a box of photos, KODAK printed in faded blue script on their backs, knowing this find, archival or communal or both, isn’t the moment either.
Though, for now, it is enough.