Photograph

Memories of the present.
  June 21, 2005

[…] He lay there, looking at the picture of his wife.  It was taken when she was a little girl—twelve, perhaps thirteen.  His wife's face was still visible in the girl's features: it hid in the crease of the lips, the squint of the eyes.  Yet the semblance merely highlighted the numerous differences that stood out sharply against its background and worried his imagination.

How strange it was, he reflected, to realize that the child in this picture used to exist, used to capture light and cast shadows, used to present to the world an image which one day burned itself into film.  That child had long ago ceased to be; in fact, she had disappeared the instant the photograph was taken.  A new, almost identical but slightly older girl had replaced her.  Then a third girl—older still, stranger still—had replaced the second girl and so on down the chain that reached into the present moment, its final link the woman moving and breathing next to him.  She was no longer the girl in the picture, he thought, but out of all the people she was the closest to that girl.  Or was she?  Was it not possible that another girl existed somewhere right now that resembled the long gone Katie much better than his wife did?  After all, many years intervened between Katie and Kate; the myriad incremental changes added up to perhaps too great a distance.

He sensed his own present fracture into individual moments, each containing a version of him that was tantalizingly close yet infinitely out of reach.  Afraid to scare this feeling off, he lay very still and listened to himself change.  His mind perceived it as the molting of the self: each passing second a new person appeared while the old one sloughed off like the skin of an onion and drifted slowly back into the murk of the past.  Time, a dark syrupy current, carried the castaway selves out of sight.

This insight was as delightful as it was alarming.  There was a precariousness to his thoughts; the lucidity with which he grasped them could only serve to break their stride and redirect them onto lower, more barren paths.  It made him uneasy.  Finally, he reached for a notebook and a pen, certain that the mere gesture would unravel his intuitions' delicate skein.  But they persisted, firm and clear.  As he put down the first words, the significance of trying to capture a mental flash inspired by a different flash that illuminated a long since elapsed instant brought a smile to his lips.  Smiling, he carefully pinned his findings to the the page, word by word. […]

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