nostalgia.
my mother has been going through old photographs. taking them out. remembering them. reorganizing them.
me playing baseball as a 5-year-old. my father with a shaved head. my mother in a debate competition. my parents in a baby shower for me — my mother in traditional dress, my father wearing a white polo and jeans. me and my brother, ten years ago, in a tour of the miller beer brewery. studio pictures of my mother; taken to draw suitors for arranged marriages; taken with no joy; taken in vain, for my mother married her best friend — my father — instead. (my mother threw away some of those photos. memories not worth remembering.) friends and family lost to time — perhaps forever. my mother’s parents, in black and white film, with my mother as a toddler between them. my brother and i as toddlers, standing inside the back of the suv my parents had before the suv my parents sold last year. my father’s family, thirteen years ago, sitting on a couch we still have, behind a coffee table we are only now replacing.
my mother has been procrastinating this journey through time. but last night she had a dream where she sorted those photos. i don’t know if or how god speaks to people, but if i had to guess, this is probably how he does it. (or is it she? or it? or they? has god given out his or her or their pronouns?)
and now, as she slips these old photographs back into thick albums, one at a time, as ghazals play in the background, she has been on the phone. calling family. friends. numbers untouched for years, perhaps. i may never know.
someday i will do the same thing. someday — actually, several somedays, years apart from each other — i will sift through old artifacts of my life. not developed film but facebook posts and instagrams and other online artifacts that will show their age not through yellowing paper or ragged edges but by low-res images, outdated technology, obsolete file extensions.
i guess i do this already. i have for years. sifting through old facebook messages and texts. reliving the stories behind the words on my phone screen. picking them apart, looking for messages between the lines. who am i? what happened the other day? does she like me?
but i only go back a week.
someday, i’ll go back years. digging through my past. my parents’ past. my hypothetical child (or children’s?) past. relive time gone by. friends lost to time. other versions of me that could have been but never were. or that were but are no more.
someday.
