[flash]
neva esminger-holland
In the picture, my father stands proudly with his shovel while my grandfather, not yet dying of Parkinson’s, holds up the maple tree that remains, albeit severely damaged by deer, in the backyard to this day. It is my third birthday, but I am not in the picture, instead, I stand behind my grandmother as she pushes down the button on her brand-new digital camera.
The picture sits in a photo book with pink velvet swirls on the cover, a perfect capture of an imperfect day. What you cannot see is that this is the first birthday after the divorce, that my mother came to my father’s house only to sulk while we planted my birthday gift, a tree.
[flash]
I’ve seen the picture of my almost brother that hangs in a dark wooden frame in my father’s house. In a fit of organization when I was ten, he stuck a label to it that reads “Sebastian 1999,” so I think that’s his name.
From what I gather, he was a friend’s foster child that my parents grew attached to. The almost brother was in his early teens when my parents decided not to adopt him after all. I only know he exists at all because my mother’s best friend accidentally let it slip when she was drunk that my parents had considered adopting a boy before I was born.
So much the better for my almost brother though, since he would have remembered the divorce between his almost parents much better than I do.
Those parents have been, like all parents, obsessed with documenting my life and their pasts with photographs. The most interesting ones being the ones they never thought I would find or the ones with stories they didn’t think I would remember.
[flash]
In the same wooden frame as my almost brother, my father stands next to a blonde woman who looks like my mother but is not. Her name, I believe, is either Gabbi or Nikki or some other name that ends with an I. The picture was taken the year my parents got married, but my mother is surprisingly absent. Maybe she’s taking the picture.
They stand under streetlights in a city so nondescript it could be literally any city in the world. It's probably Minneapolis or Saint Paul, that’s where my father lived at the time. They’re smiling, my father’s arm is around Nikki or Gabbi’s shoulder, and I wonder how they know each other. I could ask my mother, she would probably know, but I’m a little bit wary of her answer.
[flash]
I stare not at the camera, but at Luke, my arm outstretched asking for my phone back. It is the first forensics meet of the season and we both laughed as he took the picture, amused at the game we’d been playing for months. I look young and smitten, both with him and the idea of falling in love.
The camera cannot capture his words, “If you want your phone back, you’ll have to chase me for it.”
And I did, in my pretty blue dress, smiling all the while. We got stares from plenty of people but I didn’t care. Later when we kissed, he took another picture of my smile. I look better in that one, but I like this one more.
Our sisters are best friends now, but they don’t know the full story, haven’t seen this picture.
[flash]
This picture has no people in it, but I know I took it in Bangkok, between the gates of a Buddhist temple and an ancient wall. The moment I took it lives in my memory, where no one can see the Thai Dairy Queen on my nose or the guard that yelled at me for walking too close to the monument. The picture itself lives on my phone and the photo book my father had printed after we got back.
He’s done one for every trip we’ve gone on, there’s one for Greece, Japan, Italy, Laos. He only puts the best pictures in them, the most perfect ones, and deletes the rest. My mother, though, likes to keep the messy pictures. She says they help us remember what really happened.
My stepfather makes a calendar every year of all the messy photos my mother takes. Pictures of him, of me, of my sister, my mother, of us all together, collaged to make something bigger.
[flash]
This photograph is one I’ve only discovered today, in a photo book my mother keeps in our basement, away from the eyes of the world. She smiles, in a puffy dress, as my father kisses her cheek. It’s not the same as the photographs of her second wedding, which she proudly displays upstairs. It’s not as staged, not a picture of the whole wedding party on a beach in Cancun. It looks real. It was, probably.
The Antonia Holland in this picture doesn’t know that in eight years she’ll be divorced. That she’ll be forced to make a choice between her career and her marriage. That in twenty years she’ll be considering a divorce with a man she hasn’t even met yet. That it all isn’t going to work out.
[flash]
This one is a happy memory. My sister and cousin stand knee deep in the Pacific Ocean, whilst behind my iPhone, my feet are buried in the sand. I laugh as they splash each other with the water.
After the picture is taken, my sister will cry, “Sofia got water in my eyes,” and the illusion of the perfect family vacation will shatter.
I will try to restore it, to get Sofia to apologize, to stop Juliet from calling over our mothers who are arguing about who knows what further back on the beach and fail.
There is something to be said for having a physical manifestation of memory. To be able to hold in your hand an exact representation of who you were. I think sometimes it helps to mitigate my existential crisis to know that so many captures of my being live outside of myself. That the memory of me will not cease to exist when I do.
[flash]
This is the first picture that comes up when you google my name. I stand with my father in a neon green shirt, a race number pinned to my chest. My hair still brown, my teeth still crooked. My father still around. He’s still a good dad. He’s still a runner of races, not yet a ruiner of families.
I don’t remember who took the picture. Maybe one of his friends, maybe a stranger. Either way, none of us could know that the smiling father and daughter in the picture had an expiration date. That there would only be so many more pictures of us smiling together.
This moment is forever linked with my name. It is there for anyone to see if they simply know where to look, even though I wish I could hide it away in a basement of my own, away from sunlight and the prying eyes of the world.
But I suppose, it is not for me to know who will see these images.
[flash]
The photograph sits in my sophomore yearbook, under a big red heading that reads “Winter Musical.” It is the only picture of myself that I truly hate, but I cannot quite remember why. Perhaps, it’s the fact that I’m wearing grotesque stage makeup, the epitome of the ugly stepsister I was supposed to be. Maybe it’s Jackson’s arm stretched around my shoulder, a reminder of the person I thought I loved but really just aggressively liked. I think though, that it captures perfectly who I used to be and I resent that person, who didn’t know any better.
That’s always the risk with photographs, that you’ll change and grow to hate the version of yourself that is forever still.
[flash]
There is nothing. The background of the picture is black. It was taken in spotlight mode on an iPhone. In the slightly lit corner, there are people but they are dressed in black. They are in mourning.
My stepfather and mother are visible. Either the photograph or day has aged them well beyond their years. They are almost unrecognizable. Juliet is there, too, but she looks much younger than she was. There is a man I don’t recognize. A woman too. They are holding hands, because they are in love or for comfort, I’m not sure. I think they are my mother’s cousins. She has a lot of cousins.
I’m not sure why I took this picture.
Neva Ensminger-Holland is a junior at Interlochen Arts Academy, and is a creative writing major. She was a finalist in Ringling College of Art and Design's Storytellers of Tomorrow contest and has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards.