Where There’s Smoke …
When we divorced, my ex-husband took a match to my childhood photos. Now I’m learning to follow the breadcrumbs that lead me back to my own history.
It was awkward, calling my soon-to-be ex-husband. We’d seen each other only twice in the months since we’d separated. With no kids connecting us and the lawyer done drawing up divorce papers, there was little left to say.
Except this: I’d like to come over and get my photos.
When we’d lived together at his grandmother’s house, I’d kept my photographs in a large shopping bag in an upstairs closet. I can still remember the feel of that stiff, white paper bag and how I worried it might rip because it had gotten so heavy. It was home to an ever-growing mountain of memories, some loose but most still in the envelopes they’d been slipped into the day they were printed. Brown plastic strips of negatives were still tucked neatly in with most of them, but that was the only neat thing about this motley collection of moments and milestones.
It wasn’t organized by date or by event or by anything, really.
I always meant to get it sorted into albums. But what had started in 1983 as a few envelopes in a dresser drawer had grown so much that there never seemed to be time to sort it all. More than a decade of my life resided in that bag. I was sure I’d make sense of it eventually.
Some photos were ours together from the years we’d dated and been married, but most were simply mine. They were a paper-and-emulsion record of my life from 15 to 30 — everything from birthday parties and high school dances captured with the first little Kodak camera my parents let me use to every photo I’d snapped through college and beyond.
People didn’t take nearly as many photos then as we do now. And when you finally got prints back from the pharmacy or the Fotomat, half were out of focus or cut off key parts of someone’s head.
I didn’t care. They all went in the bag.
And on the day I made that phone call, as I was piecing my life back together in the wake of separation and this painful divorce, it didn’t matter whether those photos were good or bad. It just seemed more important than ever to have those bits of my history in my hands.
He didn’t answer when I called. He was living at his grandmother’s house again, and his voice picked up on the answering machine there just like it always had. At the beep, I left an awkward message explaining that I’d been meaning to get the photos, and asking whether he’d rather I pick them up at the house or if we should meet somewhere else.
He never called back. He passed a message along through my sister, though. It was this:
A friend had suggested it would be cathartic for him to burn all of the photos, setting them on fire as a symbolic way of getting rid of me.
So he’d done it. Burned every single one. Slices of my life up in smoke, one after another.
He told her that he wasn’t sure if it had helped.
As you might imagine, I’ve learned to really despise Throwback Thursdays.
Sometimes I wonder if I actually existed during the chasm of years from eighth grade all the way up until after divorce court. I have almost no photographic record. My parents weren’t big on taking photos, and there was no film in their camera on the day of my high school graduation. So sometimes I look at the few grainy images I have and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.
Lately, while contemplating all this, I’ve thought of writing a short story about a woman who realizes years later that — for a period of her teenage years— she never really existed.
I must have existed, right? I see this photo from our family vacation to Hawaii — the big trip my parents spent months deciding to splurge on. But I strain to remember other images from that summer. I know I cut my hair at some point, razoring off one side after I’d shifted from Duran Duran’s bubblegum pop to mainlining Erasure, the Eurythmics and Depeche Mode.
But I’m not sure when that happened, or exactly how much of my dorky teenage suburban bob I actually had the nerve to chop off. It’s impossible to tell from the images posted here, scanned from my mother’s photo albums by my (supportive, non-fire-starting) husband of the past 15 years.
His efforts at combing through my family albums and scanning pictures of me have definitely helped. They are something to hold onto, even as they point up what’s still missing.
It’s a kind of crappy quirk of fate that the images my mom has in her albums come mostly from the periphery of the period I lost: I’m either younger than high school or older than college, or they’re the formal photos that everyone has — the senior picture, the prom-gown image. It’s those in-between moments when I became me that have been, for so many years now, lost to the mists.
And yet … lately I’ve realized there’s something I can do about all this. The same technologies and platforms that have me aching at not having old photos of my own can be my route to getting them back.
Step One: It’ll be awkward, but I’m going to reach out to the Facebook friends that I knew in those “missing years” and ask if they might look through old photos to see if there are some that I appear in. If so, would they be willing to scan them, or even just take photos of those photos, and send me the files? I wasn’t the only one with a camera back then. I’m sure someone somewhere has photographic evidence of me with too much hairspray existing in the ’80s and early ‘90s.
It’s not the sort of message people will be expecting — “Hi, hope you’re well. I wonder if you could help me with something. My ex torched all of my old photographs…” — but I’m going to send it anyway.
And there’s more I can do. I’m a journalist. I research and report on other people’s lives for a living, and I love the challenge of piecing together facts and histories to make sense of a person’s story. It’s time to apply those same skills, that same reporting and researching, to my own story.
So, Step Two:
I’m going to hunt for public images from events I attended and places I went, captured way back when I would have been there. Maybe the state park where I went to the beach every summer has archived photos from the late ‘80s or the ‘90s. Maybe my old schools have yearbook file cabinets containing images from dances and football games I remember or events I can’t even recall all these years later. Maybe a local library has a photo archive I can explore.
I may have lost my photographic evidence, but I can still piece together someone else’s. Maybe, somewhere in recent history, I can relocate me.
It isn’t the same as having back the contents of that oversized white shopping bag. But I’m going to get as close as I can. I know I was there during those decades of learning and growing and heartbreak and happiness. I know I lived all that. I don’t need the photos to persuade myself it all happened, but I do need them to bring the establishing shot back into detailed focus, to show me the textures and the moments and the tiny sprinkles of experience that helped make up the recipe that is me.
Some of it was painful. Some of it was joyful. All of it was my life. And I’m ready to go back and see what the whole messy business looked like.
A few more from the depths of my brain:
- You Go First. If a working mother waits until it’s a good time to take a trip purely for herself, she will never go. Go anyway.
- Welcome to the Pool Party. Tween life on Instagram is getting weirder and weirder.
Melissa Rayworth writes about the building blocks of modern life, including parenting and marriage, home design and work/life balance, and the impact of pop culture and marketing on women’s lives. She currently does most of her storytelling from Bangkok, Pittsburgh and New York. Find a collection of her stories here. She tweets at @mrayworth.
©2017, Melissa Rayworth
