part of me

Memory is more that just a mind’s filing system, it molds you all way through, gets reflected in your judgments, reactions, view of the present. How strange it is then to feel someone else’s memory transmitted to you?
… I got 2 ugly plastic bags of old photographs. My grandfather’s photographs in dog-eared partially torn albums, heaps of them in smaller plastic bags, those originally destined for milk. Soon they covered all the floor of the room, hundreds of eyes looking at me, around, at each other, smiling and frowning, filling the room with long-forgotten emotions. So strange it was to recognize the faces even if you've never seen them that way. So strange it was to feel one’s own presence in each of them, so REAL it was, almost as if they evoked my own memories, which just somehow faded in the course of time like images in the straight sunlight. It almost felt like in a second, like in pictures from 'Harry Potter', people will start moving and talking. Some of them showed my family like i’ve never seen them, in others they had the same face expressions I saw with my own eyes an eternity ago. I cried several times out of that overwhelming recognition, out of inability to fathom that these people that look so alive, that are so dear to me are not here anymore.
Throwing old photographs away is a crime. It’s like throwing one’s own memories to trash.










I now think the charm of old photographs is not about the film. It’s in the fact that people back then still didn’t learn how to pose and wear picture-time smiles. Those smiles were real.