I was recently at my grandparents house. Up from their moldy basement my grandfather came holding a black garbage bag. He dumped it on the ground in front of us and out spilled photographs, hundreds of photographs. Most were black and white, some were dated in a meticulous script, some were pasted onto a piece of cardboard, some we corroding by the second. They reeked of mold and degraded chemicals; the glue on the back of same had rotted leaving only a sticky finish.
They showed my grandparents in their voluptuous prime, remarkably similar to how they are now: the same eyes, the same smiles, but different shapes. If your eyes were squinted or your glasses removed, the washed out emulsions depicting them at the beach could hardly be told apart from the more recent images that reside on digital cameras and facebook profiles.
We passed them around, pointing them out, though they all were the same. Familiar, comforting, like looking backward through binoculars, the way a dream you know to be a dream can be indulged in.
And then at the bottom we found letters. Hundreds of letters. On hotel stationary, on copy paper, on envelopes, on medical reports. "Dear Darling." "My Beautiful Wife." "To My Husband Whom I Miss." "Kisses and All" "If I am to die." "The children are well." "Mother said this would happen." "Came so close to a car accident." "Kennedy killed." "Was sick last night." "We may need to push the wedding back." "Always Zoe." "Love and Tenderness to the kids."
I was flabbergasted and excited. Reading snatches here and there I rifled through, never finishing a whole letter before going on to the next. The pages were yellow and thin, some were near breaking, but unlike the photographs they had not aged a day, let alone decades. The voices poured out. Voices familiar, clear.
I ran my finger over a page, I could feel the indent left in the paper by a ball point pen. Even if I were blind, I'd know there was writing here.
The smells of roasted chicken wafted in from the kitchen. "It's almost dinner time," my grandmother proclaimed, walking into room with a smile.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? DO I LOOK DEAD YET? PUT THOSE AWAY!"
-Robert de Saint-Loup
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