The Photograph

The photograph yellows at its edges, corners curled like hands releasing what they once held.

I find it folded in the spine of a book I thought I'd finished, a pressed flower of proof— you were here, solid, real, before the forgetting began.

The light in the image is strange: golden but somehow metallic, the kind that only exists in the between-times, when the sun forgets what day it is.

Your face is turned away, reaching for something just beyond the frame— a door, a voice, the ordinary miracle of whatever came next.

I hold it to the window now, let the present light score through the past, and for a moment both exist at once: the person in the photograph, and the one who remembers her.