Cleaning out the upper part of my antique desk — a task decades overdue! — a photo fell into my hands. I paused; I stared at it as memory returned.
Not long before the car crash that injured my brain, I began to focus on portrait photography in natural light. I took a series with my Minolta Maxxum film camera of my nephew and someone long out of my life.
Why had I stashed this print here out of the series so many years ago?
I took a quick photo of it with my iPhone 13 Mini then played with blur and pencil in the Pixlr app. Not too shabby. (The brain injury ended my foray into portraits.)
I think his expression is what captured me. That time, that place, before my life imploded, so well caught in the way he’s looking at the person he adored back then in the 1990s. Both out of my life for years now.
When life trundles along, meandering into the usual financial and relationship problems we all face as it follows the path of your dreams, you cannot fathom that people so much a part of your existence will vanish from it like dandelion fluff when hell comes barrelling for you.
Maybe that’s also why I kept the print, to see if grief still wells up when I look upon it. Today, only melancholy mixed with bittersweet loss of my pre-brain injury portrait photography foray and a tincture of admiration at what I used to be.
