Down the rabbit hole.

Apparently, she has done this before.

We had to go in, alarm bells were sounding too often from that uninhabited space. We did not know if it was burning, if it was flooding. We did not know what was wrong. So we had to go in. We thought it was empty. And it is, but for the memories.

Clothes are strewn everywhere, little jumpers and little booties for little bodies that may be cold somewhere else. Photographs and phonographs, books and letters, past and past, here and there, and everywhere. These have been left to lie where they fell. Where has she fallen? Where is she now? And why has she left her life behind?

She’s used to this, someone says. She often picks up and just goes, clutching her kin, with nothing but that in which she stands. She often moves about, filling empty spaces, creating new lives, new names, new memories. She is one of the forgotten many, one of those that slip through the cracks of this multi-fissured society. She is forgotten and actively forgetting all that she seeks to build. But the interest lies not in her building, but in her forgetting to dismantle. Or perhaps it is a desire to leave a trail, a snapshot ridden breadcrumb path, littered with demand notices, red lettered anger, and hardly subversive threats. Perhaps she is running, but her sticks are too deeply rooted, if even momentarily for that to be completely true. There is evidence of deeper life in these forsaken walls.  There are things on hooks, there are things in pots, albeit dying for lack of company and care, there are things  put away, stored, stacked. There are labels and indications of organisation. There is a semblance of a normal life here, one of semi-permanence. And then she walked out of an open door, turned around and locked it and never returned. She has done this before.

The photographs sadden me most. Smiling, small faces, music and laughter emanating from light sensitive paper, time embedded in a moment, a moment captured in two dimensional space, that moment frozen leaving our imagination only to fill the narrative of the preceding and proceeding time-line. It makes me sad that one would leave those things behind. Or that one’s mind might become so frozen itself that the things that these life captures represent no longer hold any great import, no longer trigger a response. It saddens me that another fell into a chasm of darkness, possible desperation and all there was to do was to keep walking in the opposite direction. I hope one day you find a place where you can stop, where something means something to you. I hope one day you can find your light, and your place of rest. I hope one day you can take new photographs and that you will be whole enough to keep them.

They want to burn her things, to clear the space for another. I am holding them off as long as I can.

Whereever you are…please come and get your pictures.