Polaroid

Just a memory, sweeping through me.  Something incomplete.  Burning under my eyes as I write.  There’s a lightness in my feet, a hole forming where my throat should be.

Simple little things, tinted with sunset colors.  That white frame signifies its age.  They’re all of things I haven’t seen before…yet I have.  Somewhere in that missing part of me.  It’s only then that I realize that something is gone, or maybe never there.

It’s not like I was there for it, anyway.  That’s when you know how much heart they hold.  How important they are…photos have never moved me, you know.  I tend to find them boring.  But these little thumbnails, not tangible, choke me with their soul.  Maybe I’ve found…

An unknown part of myself in shower drains and blurry head shots.  A memory of that camera, those ancient portraits of parents and grandfathers.  It was pink with multicolored flowers, new really.  The film was old and corrupted, and always ruined the picture somehow.  The ink wouldn’t develop fully.

But I loved watching the colors move and fade into a bookmarked reality.  I loved knowing that he’d touched them, what felt like eons ago.  But it wasn’t photos of things I know, not now.  It was the memory that I’d taken them; that they’d been brought back.  Random faces, with captions written neatly on the bottom.  I see my sloppy cursive ghosted over them.  A memory of years I had and didn’t have and are gone, now.  

This is what sadness is made of.