It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.
You never knew the last time you were seeing someone. You didn’t know when the last argument happened, or the last time you had sex, or the last time you looked into their eyes and thanked God they were in your life.
After they were gone?
That was all you thought about.
Day and night.
Sometimes, when it’s raining, I think about you. I think about you all the way over there, with all that ocean and all those years between us. I think about if you’re doing well, what your bedroom looks like, if you enjoy your job. I think about the times when there wasn’t any ocean between us and my time was your time. I think about when I knew the answers about you, because they were my answers as much as they were yours. Sometimes, when it’s raining, I wonder if it’s raining where you are too.
You never know the last time you’ll see a place. A person.
Then I’m sorry I don’t remember more. If we knew a person was going to die, we’d hold harder to the memories.
You want the truth? Well, here it is. Eventually, you forget it all. First you forget everything you learned – the dates of wars and the Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your favorite teachers, and eventually you forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. And eventually, but slowly, you forget your humiliations – even the ones that seemed indelible, just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who had the most friends. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.
I’ll never know what it was he wanted me to remember.
I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.
I don’t know when we’ll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
secretive dreams 