Photographs

I have been working my way through my archive of photographs from the past nine years and appending metadata with locations and keywords.  My goal is to make my collection more easily searchable and to encode some kind of information with the photos for anyone who looks at them without me.  So far I have only gotten to 2006.  I have tens of thousands of photographs.  At least when I get up past 2009 it will speed up as I haven’t been taking photos in recent years.  I’ve been too busy making a living.  It’s kind of sad I have to give up something I love doing but could never make a dime from to do something I hate but that pays my mortgage.  Life is fucked up.

In going through the 2006 photos I found myself having mild anxiety attacks.  I didn’t realize what was causing it until I got to the end of June 2006 and started seeing photographs of my baby sister Miriam.  We took a trip to Seattle Washington that year to visit our sister Rachael and her husband.  It was really a trip for Miriam to visit Rachael but I was asked to tag along ( I suspect mostly because I was Miriam’s ride to and from the airport).  We went to the Japanese gardens and to a state park while we were there.  Seeing her ghost in those photos brought all the emotions back up to the surface, still as strong as they were in February of 2007 when she killed herself.

My anxiety was caused by the shallow subconscious knowledge that I was going to start seeing her in photographs and with each month I worked through I was coming closer to the end.  To this day I do not understand her actions and I know I never will.  I wrote all my thoughts and feeling down at the time in a black book that hasn’t been opened since.  I poured out all the sorrow and confusion and asked all my questions over and over on the pages of that book.  I know I’ll never get any answers but putting the questions on paper allowed me to stop tormenting myself with them.

Every once in a while in moments of weakness or darkness I find myself imagining I can talk to her.  If I allow this self-indulgence  in my imaginings I will try to talk her out of killing herself.  Sometimes I imagine I rushed out to Canehill after I spoke with her that night and in my imagination I arrive in time to talk her out of her final act.  Or I play “what if” games where I didn’t go to that damned super bowl party and stayed in Canehill that night instead of leaving her alone in that cabin, in the dark Arkansas woods, with that loaded gun.  Other times I have a conversation with the phantom she left in my memory trying in vain to wheedle out some glimmer of understanding of her motives.  All this serves no purpose and I try to avoid such activity when I catch myself at it.

In the end I will never understand.