The Photograph

It starts like this, I’m walking down a deserted hallway. There is little noise aside from the creeks and sounds of the building itself. The smell of food cooked hours before lingers in the air. What little light there is streams through a dust covered window at the far end of the hall. You can see the dust dancing in the beams of light. You’d think these beams would add warmth to the darkness of this hallway, but instead they only serve to enhance its dinginess. I do not know exactly what it is I’m doing here or what I’m searching for, but I am certain that I will know it when I see it.

I try the door on my right and am not surprised to find it unlocked. Memory tells me it was rare to find it locked. The room beyond the door is much brighter then the hallway. I step into the room, blind, my eyes need a moment to adjust. This room does not fit inside this building. Everything is so neat and orderly, never a inch out of place. You could almost move the room out the building entirely, to someplace completely different, and no one would ever notice. It’s as though it were from a different time. From some time before this neighborhood became the wrong side of the tracks. When the streets were less obtrusive, when the grass still existed.

There’s a slight layering of dust on the furniture. Its strange to see, the apartment is usually immaculate. I run a finger along a shelf, rubbing it against my thumb, feeling the ever so slightly grainy dust between my finger tips. I run my hands along the books on the shelf. They cover the room, every table, shelf, and surface of any kind has books piled on them. I feel the gilded titles, smiling at the memories. I’d read everyone at least once. It was the one thing we shared, an intense love for the stories. These books are the reason I became a writer, I wanted to have my own words immortalized in paper like these books. I wanted to find that smell, the fresh paper scent of a book and now that the words that fill the pages were mine. But this isn’t the memory I’ve come for.

I know what I am looking for now. I have seen it here in this apartment many times before. I remember looking at it when I was a young girl, trying to find a piece of myself in it, trying to understand where I came from. It’s on the dresser where its always been. The young woman in the photo is smiling. She’s walking along the beach, toward the photographer, and the wind is blowing her hair into her face. Her hands run through her hair and her eyes, my eyes, look right into me, or more likely the person who was taking her photo. She looks happy, but a part me knows that it won’t last. None of my memories of her can be seen as happy. This picture is the only proof I have that she was ever happy. A part of me wishes I could talk to the person in this picture. There is so much I would ask, so much I want, and need, to know.

I pick up the photo, the silver frame is cool to the touch. It is the only photo in the apartment, it was always the only photo. I take one last look around. The movers will be here soon. They will pack this all up in dozens of identical cardboard boxes, and then they will have it put in storage in some locker amidst hundreds of lockers exactly the same. I can’t get rid of it, not just yet. It is some what comforting to me, to know that it will be there if ever I find a need for it. That in some storage locker somewhere the smell in this apartment will be preserved, in case I ever need to remember again.

Then I turn around and I leave for the last time, and for the first time, I don’t look back.