“Through the Lens of a Fading Photograph.”

If I could preserve you forever,

I think I would choose a photograph 

not because paper could ever contain you,

but because I am frightened by the thought
that time might one day persuade me
that you were never as beautiful
as I remember.

There you are,

caught in that delicate silver of memory:

your long black hair falling carelessly
across your glasses,

dark as a midnight no star
has ever dared to disturb.

And your hands…

those slender, veined hands seem almost too delicate for this world,

as though they were fashioned
for turning the pages of forgotten books
or touching things too precious
to be named.

You dress as though you belong
to some beautiful rebellion against daylight,

cloaked in darkness,

in strange colors and stranger silhouettes;

and yet, beside your friends,

you become almost weightless.

You laugh.

You wander.

You exist without ceremony.

Oh, how I envy the ease with which
you give yourself to happiness.

I have watched you from a distance
and wondered how someone could carry
so much quietness within him
and still laugh so freely.

Perhaps that is why I love you.

Because you are not a storm.

You are the silence that follows one.

You are the mule deer my camera captured
during that camping trip;
standing alone at the boundary of the trees,
beautiful without knowing it,
watchful without fear.

I remember how briefly it remained.

One moment, there.

The next, gone.

And still, I kept the photograph.

Perhaps I have always loved things

which cannot be persuaded to stay.

You remind me of an Oregon forest in the fog
endless pines disappearing into silver mist,
the earth darkened by rain,
the air carrying the scent of moss and distant cedar.

A place I could wander into
and willingly lose every road home.

That is what you are to me.

A wilderness.

A beautiful uncertainty.

And if I were foolish enough
to enter that forest knowing
I might never find my way out,
I think I would still go.

Gladly.

For what is being lost
if one is lost somewhere beautiful?

Sometimes I look at that fading photograph
and wish, with an almost unbearable tenderness,
that I could step through the glass.

Not to change anything.

Not to possess the moment.

Only to stand there beside you
for one impossible second
and tell you what I could never tell you
while you were laughing with your friends:

That I noticed you.

That I always noticed you.

The fall of your hair.

The quiet movement of your hands.

The way your glasses disappear beneath the dark.

The way your laughter changes your entire face.

The way you seem to belong everywhere
and nowhere at once.

I noticed all of it.

And perhaps you will never understand
how devastatingly beautiful
an ordinary moment can become
when it is the only moment
one has left to remember.

The photograph continues to fade.

The edges soften.

The colors surrender.

Even your face is beginning to disappear
beneath the merciless hands of time.

But strangely,

the more the photograph fades,
the more clearly I remember you.

Perhaps memory is cruel like that.

It destroys the evidence
only to make the feeling immortal.

So let the photograph disappear.

Let the paper grow pale.

Let the years take everything
they believe belongs to them.

I will still remember you
as the boy beneath the black hair,

the boy with the delicate hands,
the boy who laughed without knowing
that someone was quietly falling in love
with the way he existed.

And if someday
all that remains is a blurred image
and the faintest suggestion of your face,

I will look at it
with the same foolish devotion.

Because you were never merely
someone I happened to photograph.

You were the moment
the world became beautiful enough to be worth remembering.