A Snapshot

One of my students told me that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a ripped one is worth a million. At the time I thought that he was incredbly clever for his age, and for a moment, I wished I could be him.

A photograph is really a story told by the photographer, but lost in translation by the viewer. There is a picture in a box on my closet shelf of a man wih a little girl on his shoulders, his first time at the ocean, her hundredth. They stare out at a salty gray sea, lost in its immensity, their thoughts, that moment...and I watch them watching life. Who am I to say that they are happy. I wonder if they saw that photograph now....would they have a million other words to say?

And now he watches her grow up, a thousand miles away, in his edited version of a story of photographs he receives occasionally. In his edited version of a story between two lovers who didn't make it, he imagines a life he can almost touch...that slips away as easily as the fog he watches from his back porch, the woods he chose, dreaming only of the seaside in the early morning quiet before his family wakes.

Sometimes I wish he would rip that picture into a thousand tiny fragments.

Because I know that I can't.