Paper Veil

In Los Angeles, you learn very quickly photos are nothing but constructions, dichotomous ends from fortuitously captured moments. Even the seemingly candid are a construction of the subject; everyone always on airs even when a camera is around, even when a photographer believes a rare, true moment in time was snagged for posterity.

No, real life doesn’t happen in front of cameras, it happens in meetings, over meals.

The real records of life in L.A. are in the receipts.

I hate receipts.

Photos at least, photos can be used to convince yourself that things were indeed good, that there were times of happiness and joy then, those help make the case to justify nostalgia. You can see hope in the smiles, the ‘cheeses’ and other ‘cheese’-rhyming words, heck even the half-smiles have hope. Maybe the half-smilers are simply tired, or minimally making an attempt—trying, at least—to let others know in their soul they’re okay. And maybe if you’re lucky someone will be mid-blink and suddenly find yourself laughing.

Receipts… well, receipts are much more surreptitious. Surely not on the surface, the transaction record is printed in plain view, but the reminders of the moment, of the meals, of the meetings, those lie waiting in the shadows to abduct you back into a past memory. No hope for an unexpected visual gag here.

Somewhere in those little objective pieces of commemorated carbon paper, the vignettes hide. Even the print slowly silences itself over time, a swan song of times past.

Soon all that remains are memories of remembering. The paper fading much in the same way the memory does—first a few letters here, a ‘b’ and then a ‘3’, then characters disappearing together until they’re nothing but ghosts in time.

Pointers to past memories of memories.

I’m packing up.

I lived in a nice space, by the beach, there’s beautiful weather everyday and reasons to smile all around. But after her suicide, even happy moments, happy memories, the half-smiles and small meetings, everything is colored by our unexpected disconnection.

I wish I took more photos, had more pictures to pretend that at least there was that moment when she was happy, that buried underneath she was still half-happy, half-smiling, half-trying.

But no, all I have now are receipts.