Photographs

Photographs are terrible at preserving time and strangely good at preserving details I had forgotten mattered. #

I opened old photograph folders tonight and disappeared. Dangerous activity. One image leads to another, one year opens another, and suddenly the computer becomes a corridor longer than the house. I found pictures of Milano that made me remember a handbag I had completely forgotten. Genova sea. Mom’s apartment. Dad. Old haircuts. Yuri with a face so young it almost looks like somebody related to him rather than him. Hikari in photographs that I can look at now without the old immediate collapse, although the absence still has a shape and probably always will. Early Amsterdam. Boxes. Streets I photographed because everything looked unfamiliar. Then newer photographs where the same streets appear incidentally behind somebody, no longer subjects, just background. That change may be the most honest record of living here. At first I photographed Amsterdam. Now I photograph my life and Amsterdam happens to be around it. I closed the folders before midnight because I know myself. There are fourteen years of digital archaeology in this computer and tomorrow is a workday.

Remember me, Eclipse.