Photograph

Apr 17, 2008 - 17:24 PM PST

Last night I was looking at a picture of my grandma. Well, two pictures actually. One was in this collage I had made a long time ago, if you saw it it would be self explanatory. There is this other picture that was taken...oh I must have been 3 years old, I think....it was taken in my great grandmother's living room in Philadelphia, and the picture is of my grandma and I. She's sitting in a chair and I'm standing next to her in my favorite dress (at the time...I remember because it was red and white and had this giant strawberry embroidered on the white part). We both have huge smiles on our faces. Her face looks exactly the same as it always did, as I always remember it. Of course, I was tiny, had chipmunk cheeks and blond hair, but it's still my face. The smiles. I don't remember that moment, but the smiles are genuine. Even though I don't remember that moment, I have it. I have it right in front of me.

This picture makes me sad. I don't remember exactly what it was like to be that 3 year old. To be so happy and unknowing. It makes me sad because that purity is gone, and so is my grandma. The only thing that is still true about that picture, is love. Everything thing else, everything that I can see in this picture...the strawberry dress, my great grandmother's living room, my grandma...all of it is gone. But I still have this. This photo. It's tangible yet it isn't. Everything that this photo represents is now a distant memory, but I will have it always.

This is why I love photography. That moment will never happen again, it was gone in an instant, but I have it forever.

I miss her. I miss her more than anything in this entire world. I miss her more than I miss that 3 year old who didn't know that life would be like this. I can't tell you how many nights after her death I pleaded with "God" to bring her back, so I could just take back what I had said, so I could just feel her arms around me and she could know how sorry I was. That I didn't mean it, that I did love her and that I didn't really wish she were dead. How that sentence has haunted me for 9 years. It was the last thing she heard me say to her.

But then I have this photo. I look at it and it makes me feel like she knows, that maybe she has a photo of this...wherever she is...whether she has it in her mind...or whatever....I hope she has it, like I do.