The Album

And here you are on the end of a smile that doesn't seem to fit your face, caught in the startle of a flash, still and ageless after all these years. I wonder what thoughts were in your mind when the shutter clicked to hold you there, a wafer of who you were back then, set free of time to surface here, unchanged. I will never know. Each image now a closed book revealing nothing but its cover or, at best, by luck, a small, unexpected glimpse of something more caught in an expression or in a look of the far way reflected in your eyes. Love always reaches back to redeem what it can to restock the treasures stolen from its stores by time. And years hence, will there be someone looking at a photograph of us, deciphering the pose, seeking out a message written in our eyes. Will they see something hidden in an old photograph left there by chance, a sliver of who we were, a little bit of bone to replenish what remains of us in their reliquary of love.