In The Photo Album of My Life . . .

In The Photo Album of My Life . . . tr> In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. If you look closely, you will see the vague outlines of where the pictures once were, but I have had to remove them. I don’t know where they are now. I may have tossed them in a box in the cellar, perhaps, or worse, in a waste bin somewhere along the way to here. I know that I can be impulsive, sometimes even a little impetuous. Some call me unforgiving. That may be so. In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. I have had to offer some of my pictures up to the wind. I have had to let them fly out and away through the windows of my experience, never to return. I suppose I could say I never wanted to see them go, but I’m not sure that is so. In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. There comes a time in a friendship or in the battle for love, that letting go becomes the only chord left in a song that has become disharmonious. It’s a dark moment in a dark room when the music stops. And I suppose, too often, the anger or the sadness you feel at that moment can freeze you in time, hold you like a snapshot locked in one place. I have never allowed that to be so. Those are the photographs I have had to remove, images of friends and lovers I have had to let go. I refuse to be subdued by my sadness or regret. A camera needs using. A life finds new photographs. In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. Things fall apart. Some of the friends I trusted over the years have tossed me aside like pieces of silver into a blind man’s cup. I suppose I disappointed some of them in some hard choice I had to make. Still, I never expected that they would go. I never knew that the measure of a friendship could be so fragile. I never knew how quickly someone could betray a trust or break a confidence. Too often, I was nothing more than a marionette dangling from the strings of their self-interest. If I had known, I would have reached a wooden hand high above my head, and cut myself free long before the end of the show. In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. Love cools. Passion freezes far too quickly, like winter ice over any quiet lake. I miss these pictures most of all, but I never hesitated to take them out. I know how a lost love lingers, how every step away is fraught with hesitation and a confusion that asks you not to go. Words of doubt collide with vows of promise. Hope rises and falls like a roller coaster that has lost its track and flies off towards a disastrous end. Too often, I have remained belted in for that ride, all the while knowing the crash would come and knowing I did not care that the crash was coming. In the photo album of my life, you will find some empty pages. I suppose I remember each snapshot that is missing now. The faces of friends and lovers, those who have slipped from the watchfulness of my days and into the dark recesses of my memory, come flickering forward from time to time. I barely recognise them now. I guess I could say I don’t miss them, but I do. They were a part of what I was and a fuse to what I would become. They deserve to be acknowledged. They deserve to have a place in my history. And so, I have honoured them with these empty pages. I offer them nothing more.

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