Member-only story
I Wish to Be Forgotten
Please…!?
Once you are the missing person in a family story… people remember when you left, what you said. They have explanations for the departure: the changed voice, the unanswered calls, the distance where familiarity once lived.
But do they remember when you were there?
The person in the photographs, at the table, in ordinary days nobody thought worth remembering. The one who answered, arranged, helped, adjusted; who knew what needed doing before anyone asked. The one who stayed, and stayed, and stayed…
I’ve been thinking about photographs. A familiar face among familiar faces, frozen in a moment that has outlived whatever held those people together. A photograph is a peculiar palimpsest: it preserves what was visible, concealing everything beyond its borders.
What happens when someone in a photograph no longer wishes to belong to it? Is the person cropped out? Does the image become another photograph in a drawer?
I have no desire to return to the table.
I have no need to return to the frame.
I have absolutely no “me” left in me to return to the old, younger “me”.
How many family stories have a missing character who never wanted to be found? How many departures are remembered without the years that preceded them? Silence, too, can be appropriated. People furnish it with intentions, explanations, even…
