Thoughts dart in and out of my head at the speed of light, and it's hard to hit pause and pay attention. Sometimes I wish a screenshot of the inside of my skull would do.
It’s like getting sucked into an infinite loop -- thinking, then trying to stop the flow and observe what I’m thinking, then thinking about what I’m thinking, rinse, repeat.
And while I’m struggling to get off that loop, there’s a picture on my desk staring at me, as if on a thought-rescue mission. Mom’s facial expression a split second before blowing out the candles on her mille-feuille birthday cake, white hair and white dress, seems to share my surprise at finally being able to focus on one thought. The birthday girl turning seventy five, surrounded by her three children, dad a little on the side as in you guys enjoy a picture together, I’m good here. The rarity of the five of us all in the same picture.
Happy faces on an unusually hot mid-May afternoon, beneath the verandah of our red house, the scent of jasmine filling the air. There would be one last shot of us five a few months later, at my brother’s wedding, on an unusually cold late-October morning. And then dad’s passing in April, turning us five into four.
Pictures make thoughts move around instants frozen in time. We urge ourselves to create a context, or recall one. We need a story.
I don’t know why we have so few pictures of the five of us. We just do. I guess we’ve never been keen on getting others to photograph us all together. It’s never been a thing for us, a priority. And pictures don’t get taken by themselves.
This one on mom’s birthday, for example, was taken by my sister’s boyfriend. Not because we asked him to, but because he himself decided to (and asked us to pose for it). Here’s what it is: not having enough people around who would volunteer to take pictures of us together that we would never ask anybody to take. A little convoluted, but it makes sense.
Also, I hate posing for pictures. And I know mom does too. This doesn’t help.
Strangely enough, that day at the lunch table we were talking about photography and I argued that flawlessness is boring and that pictures without humans cannot be unique and that being unique is what pictures want. And dad, who liked non-boring pictures but wouldn’t particularly care about what they want, point blank demanded that I tell him the population of Indonesia. “Take a guess”, he went. My guess, absurdly low, disappointed him. Someone said something about playing internet chess, that it will never be like playing in front of a human, and we all laughed when I recalled that time when, well in my thirties, I signed up for a chess tournament and lost the opening game to an eight-year-old.
And so the conversation proceeded around random subjects as diverse as starfish and coffee. An endless number of unique frames.
Then mom blew out the candles. A split second of a time when life was simple and sweet, when dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. One in a million possible frames. Yet, the second to last.