i'm no good with fancy cameras; i prefer to buy disposables and stash them in my purse, my car, my couch. it's pointless to keep photo albums in chronological order, as i'll snap maybe five pictures on a single occasion and let the camera disappear again. it's great fun to get one developed and remember a vacation that happened years ago.
today's roll was wacky: a valentine's day bouquet, a shot of me thirty pounds heavier, joe and i looking startled at the space needle in seattle...and my parents posed at the dinner table, christmas eve. i learned maybe a month later that their divorce was finalized hours before i took the picture.
who recalls things in a linear way, anyhow? in 1999, i met an old boyfriend at a party in london. i didn't really remember that we'd been close until he smiled a certain way, and our breakup didn't hit me again until i was waiting for the bus to take me home. photos remind me that i had joe's shirt tied around my waist all night for moral support.
Memory,
pack the brain's auditorium
with inexhaustible swarms of beloveds.
Spatter laughter from eye to eye,
sate the night with former weddings' glory.
Fill every soul with a jocular mood
so that this night is forgotten by no one.
(vladimir mayakovsky, from "the backbone-flute")
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