An Old Photo Fading

Silence. Summer light. A room scarcely furnished. The man sits at his desk with a pen and a notebook. The windows are open; a summer breeze. Throughout the room, traveling trunks sit overturned or open. Notebooks, photographs, and books spill from them and into the barren space. Silence. The silence of the ages and of time and place. The sensation of coming and going. Photos, fragile and fading with age, of people and places long gone, mix with manuscripts, notebooks, and images of the man taken on long and distant travels; the camera still soiled with foreign dust. A black-and-white snapshot sits exposed. Two girls pose on the front porch smiling for the camera in 1930s bathing suits. The atmosphere almost permeates through the decades, clean and innocent like the teenage girls. Beside it is a color photo of a young woman sitting on a bench in a private garden. Its composition is more precise and less carefree. The woman glows with youthful beauty, but her expression betrays a burden and weight. A half-exposed letter written in a woman’s hand: “. . . and you do know you are always welcome here. The summers are most beautiful, and I will miss our walks in the garden, our lunches at the café, and our lovemaking in the evening. It seems so senseless for you to leave. I do wish you would hurry back so . . .” A manuscript page reads: “Simone wore a white summer dress that day. We were alone in the garden. The afternoon sun shone through it, and I could see she was bare beneath. She ran ahead and bent down to pick a flower. It was as though she was immersed in a white glow. I desired her but could only stare. I wanted nothing more than to be in the garden and with her. All my hopes and dreams of success and accomplishment paled by comparison. I wished this moment would last, but knew it wouldn’t; nothing ever does. Her face remains fresh to me, even at this distance. I can feel and . . .” A stack of notebooks has fallen to the side. The covers have place names written on them: France. Italy. London. Africa. Spain. Photos of people, places, and art, a life of travel and experience, and by extension, loss. Nothing more except these fragments, themselves fading and falling to pieces.

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