An Old Photograph

 

An Old Photograph

The verse

A photograph keeps the light
but not the temperature of the room.
It keeps the smile
but not what came right before it,
or right after.

It freezes for one second
out of thousands that day held,
And somehow we trust it
to speak for all the rest.

Strange, what we choose to remember by.
Stranger still, what gets left
outside the frame.

The vignette

Every house has one drawer like this, not organized, not labelled, just a place where old photographs collect because no one has decided what else to do with them.

Pull one out at random, and it rarely shows what you'd expect. Not the big day. Not the planned moment. More often, it's someone laughing at something off-camera, or caught mid-sentence, looking slightly away from the lens.

Those are the ones that last longest in memory, oddly. Not because they were important at the time, but because no one tried to make them important. They just happened to be there when the shutter clicked.

Maybe that's the quiet trick of photographs, they don't preserve what mattered most. They preserve what happened in front of them. And somehow, looking back, that turns out to be enough.

What's a photograph that's stayed with you not because of the moment it captured, but because of something it accidentally caught?



"With words and warmth" - Vivekini Mata

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