The other night, I was looking through my Cloud and photos of you photos of us started to pop up. And for a brief moment, my heart stopped. It felt like the “Someone You May Know” section on Facebook. But it was someone I did know. Someone that at one point in time I could even say was my world. It was someone I loved, but now they seemed so distant. Almost that of a stranger.
I just stared and started to scroll through our pictures sometimes smiling other times with tears in my eyes. My roommate walked by and asked why I still had them, and I couldn’t find a real reason until now.
There's something beautiful about a photograph. Something so pure and everlasting. So when I think of our love I think of it in our photographs.
A standstill of interesting moments like when we went to the kite festival at the beach, when I made you a flower crown, or that rare genuine smile. I kept scrolling and I saw that I captured the one time I made you laugh and the other time I watched you learn how to box in the park with your friends.
But the problem with capturing love in photographs is that those photographs don't capture the split second after the flash goes off or even the immediate moments after.
They don't capture how as soon as the photo's over you let go of my hand and distance yourself from me. They don't capture the awkward moments and confused stares as I am looking at you and you are looking everywhere but. They don’t capture what is behind but rather only what the camera is pointing at, which more often than not was staged. They don't capture you looking at her because when I tried to capture our love in photographs, pain wasn't apart of it. It wasn’t my intended outcome. If I wanted that, I would have needed videos and a team dedicated to candids much like the Kardashian's. But I chose photographs.
When I look at our photographs, I see love. I see love because that's what I captured - or at least attempted to. But as I reread my journal, I remember the pain and it comes back to me more vividly than a photograph ever will. Those photos will always hold those memories because quite honestly I don't want them anymore.
So thank you for the love captured in photographs, it was probably the only love there ever was.
