I took this photo with my fourth roll off my Holga last year. It was my second set of photographs since the first three had been taken at one place a couple of nights before. I was surprised by this photograph, so I wrote this vignette for it.



I used to dream of you every night in such vivid color, in Dolby Digital Surround Sound, even. There was nothing I knew better than your face, than the almond shape of your eyes and the length of your lashes; the velvet of your skin, the sweet intoxication of your lips, the revelation in your smile, the music of your laugh. All these things, I knew like I knew my own self. All these things, I locked away into the chambers of my heart.

I loved you once. I once believed that you loved me, too.

I still dream of you every now and then, now that we are no longer part of each other's lives. But your face is not as clear. Your edges bleed into the background, your face is distorted in a blur of white. You are the shape of something familiar that has taken an unfamiliar turn, something that has changed in ways that I cannot pinpoint. Like someone else's Impressionist depiction of you. Like someone else. And the only thing I have left that is true is your name, which I do not speak.

You are like the memory of an old, rotting photograph that I saw as a small child, of my dead grandmother when she was young and beautiful. Maybe if I wait long enough, you'll fade away and crumble to dust, and no longer haunt me.

Sometimes, I begin to wonder if I ever knew myself at all.