pictures

We take them so we can relive, recapture moments we know that someday we may forget. We are fighting our own minds and we are banking on the negative, so sure our minds will lapse and forget our own lives that we will need a visual to call it fourth.

Sometimes pictures hurt. Nostalgia can be a dangerous beast, reminding you of the things you meant to do, the hurt you had yet to feel, the pain you didn’t know was hiding under the surface of your then smile. Like a rubberband pulled taught and snapped, your mind goes back and fourth from then and now, from happiness or pain, from love or longing, from what happened and what was it I meant to accomplish in this life.

I choose to leave the albums on a shelf in plain view of my everyday ramblings through my home. I rarely take them down and when I do it is usually late at night when anyone else in the pictures is fast asleep, next to lovers or husbands or wives or babies. I am not, I am roaming the rooms of this empty home looking for an answer to what it was I meant to accomplish in this life.

It is a senseless question and one I often ignore, pretend it doesn’t exist. I thought I had a path once. I thought I could have predicted and determined where it was I meant to go, what it was I meant to do. I stopped that thinking, realizing instead that going with the flow of life would lead to less worry, less stress, less “what ifs.” And the pictures of my past recall the things I have not done. And I wonder if the girl in those pictures would recognize the girl holding them in her hands today. Would she be her friend? Would console and comfort her? Would she laugh and joke with her? Would she applaud and welcome her? Or would she kick her ass?