Photographs and Time

The photograph curls at its edges, silver-gray ghosts pressed into paper, faces softened by decades of fingertips.

What was bright once is muted now, colors bleached by attic heat and forgetting. You search the eyes for recognition, but they've already looked away.

Time moves like light through water— bending, refracting, never quite true. The girl in the frame is not the woman who holds it, yet something persists: a tilt of the chin, a line around the mouth, unbroken.

We are all becoming our own ancestors, each moment a photograph, each photograph a door closing quietly behind us.