Djelloul Marbrook

Sorting through old photographs rearranges the mind wickedly. The pictures become the graveyard of your myths. The expressions and body language you didn’t choose to see before fix you like a deer in their headlights. You can’t warm yourself in the freezing truth of these captive moments.

The people you thought you loved and whom you thought loved you make strange. The ones you thought leaned towards you lean away, and there is your sappy face trying to win the affection of those you clearly inconvenience. There is your smiling, defeated face, having declared a victory and withdrawn into a myth.

Frame after frame the emerging picture is one of deracination.

But there are those you did love, who loved you, and often enough you neglected them to woo the ones who never would. Now you are unspeakably sad, exactly where you should have been then. All these moments from which you should have walked away if only you had had your senses. But you didn’t, and here is proof.

Old photographs often represent what we were not ready to see, and so they required a strung sequence of fibs, right down to the inconsequential captions we wrote on the backs of them.

Should you be glad that finally you are able to see what you didn’t, what you wouldn’t see before? And if you are glad to finally confront bone truths, still you must think of all those people who never confront old photographs, who die insisting on the original myth. And some of them were your loved ones and friends.

It’s a matter of forensics, isn’t it? One cop searches a room and sees no evidence of a crime; another searches the room and recommends an arrest. Blood shows up under luminol. Old age has imbued my mind with a luminol lamp. I’m not happier for it, but I’m savvier, clearer, and somehow more forgiving. I suppose it’s easier to forgive what one sees than what one experiences as a chill.

At six my smiling face strikes me as insincere. It’s the face of someone trying much too hard to be liked, much too hard, someone pretending everything is okay. Okay for whom? Certainly not for him. How much that face must have hurt, trying to hold that smile.

I hardly know this person. I don’t want to. But that’s what I’m here for, to know him and how he became me. I know him best in the faces he photographed. He has a loving eye. After all these years I see it, but not then. On occasion, in my cold attic, I clamp my mouth with my hand in consternation. I have no pity or compassion for him. I see exactly where he’s going. It’s like watching a familiar Greek tragedy unfold. I know too much about him, and yet nothing. There is no one to offer him a hand, not even me. He is lost and it will be many years before I set out to find him, and when I do we will not know each other, other than a few superficial similarities. I want to say God bless you, child, God bless you, boy, God bless you, sir, but his blessings are already there in the photos, and he treats them like mud on his shoes. Someone has already convinced him he is a strangeling. He is trying to be loved and unnoticed at the same time. That will be his story.

When he is behind the camera I see who he loved and who he pretended to love, who loved him and who didn’t. In front of the camera he lies, behind it he tells the truth, which is why I never put his pictures in albums or hung them on walls. I put them in their cardboard coffins so as not to contend with them. I should have lit birthday candles on them and sent them down a river. Perhaps in the spring.—DM