Her Pictures

I tell her she will be with me all through the night. It is because of her pictures. The distance is hollowing, but her pictures provide stones for a bridge that well-stretches any distance. In her absence, her pictures are a compass and they are the reason for a new-found love of capturing scenery, buildings and life's moments. I am quick to save her pictures when they come. I have my favorites, call ID photos change frequently, and there is more traffic in my Dropbox than in my driveway. My iCloud is not a collage of tired selfies, not by any means, but a composition of unique fashion, silly randomness, captured grace, scenic metropolis, moments in rare time, on-the-job boredom, blunt reality, as well as unbridled happiness and draining woe. Her pictures always show more than just what is happening, the pictures are a window when there is no door.

The compulsion to save every photo darkens in every time-lapse of distance. Her pictures are the cigarettes you nervously smoke end to end while waiting for a bus that you know is coming, but you wait far too long and it looks like rain. I will sit at my keys, in a chair of stories, and sift through hundreds of pictures in an effort to crawl through the windows and forget my empty quiet. They are the windows on a slow-moving train, a slideshow of passing places and things for short moments at a time. All I can do is sit quietly in my chair, type whatever my mind can focus, and press my nose against the glass while waiting for my destination. Her pictures are calming and reminding of where the train will eventually stop, where I will have my stories and all those beautiful things I pitifully gazed through the window. When the sun sets, her pictures are the flickering candle against a soft black and white glow emitting from a small bedroom window off of a chaotic California highway. The candle is a tribute burning for the things I have no trouble remembering, simply finding it easier to sink into a vivid and tangible thing I can physically hold.

Her pictures are something I can hold in my hand and intensify emotions with my fingertips. So many moments in a distance are lost, but the pictures and the spontaneity behind them can provide the lost with the inclusion necessary to find direction. So many of her pictures share my physical timeline, but many more of them fill in the dark gaps of memory when distance was a harsh sentence, and a shadow hung in the air along with the acrid smog around the mountains. For me, her pictures are a constant theatre of hope, imagination, freedom, and a willingness to do anything so long as I am savoring every breath out of life. Distance is harsh, but her pictures burn in the window and there is an image of breathless imagination that oars against the current and calms the anxious open waters of coming new chapters. My phone will chirp and she will show me where she was and where she is, showing me what the world around her looks like. Through the distance, she gives me her life in a silent vaudeville clip show that I will cling to and revisit in my solitary midnight hour.

Her pictures are among my treasured items. I collect them like my books and arrange them like my stories. Her pictures are more than candles and oars, they are the feeling that nothing is really lost. They are an ease for lapses of time in the distance. They are, in so many ways, the privilege of opportunity to glimpse into a world that exists and is waiting. Many must rely on pure blind faith to believe that turning the page will be a beautiful and exciting thing. I am of the lucky few who can peer through a keyhole and see a room different than my own. I find calm in her pictures. I find hope and imagination in her pictures, and I survived countless nights of fear and worry because of her pictures.

The photo icon is a garden I fence from the world around me. The screen explodes with memories and she replaces in my heart all the things pillaged in the distance. Her pictures freeze time when I fear time is slipping.

She sends me a picture before her bedtime. The picture is a dimly-lit shot of pajamas and a quiet beauty. I missed nothing today. Her picture tells me goodnight and she will be with me all through the night...