Photographs Don’t Age, But I Do

Thomas had always feared forgetting more than he feared dying. It began the year his mother passed away — suddenly, quietly, like the turning off of a lamp. He was twenty-four when he found the box of old photographs buried deep in her attic, labeled in her tight, looping cursive: “Tommy: Ages 1–10.” Inside were moments he didn’t even remember living — a toothless grin under a sunhat, chubby fingers clutching a popsicle, wide eyes blinking against the flash in front of a Christmas tree. But it was the faces around him that haunted him more — people who had changed, moved away, or simply ceased to exist. Their smiles were frozen in amber while the real world unraveled.

That was when he started his tradition. Every year on his birthday, Thomas would pick one photo and recreate it with precision. At first, it was a joke. A side-by-side collage posted to social media. But then came year two, year three — and somewhere along the line, it became less about nostalgia and more about preservation. A shield against the blur of passing years. He wore similar clothes, mimicked the same expressions, found the same locations — even if the swing had rusted or the wall had been graffitied. The photos didn’t care. They were about him, not the world.

At thirty-three, the creases beside his eyes began to stay longer. At thirty-nine, he started using a bit of makeup to match the glow of his childhood skin. By forty-two, he had every recreation framed, cataloged, dated. Dozens of them — a boy with the same face as the man, trying to speak across time. It made him feel whole. Like maybe the boy hadn’t gone anywhere. Like maybe, deep down, he could stay.

Then, on his forty-third birthday, the camera didn’t click.

He stood at the edge of Mirror Lake, the wind teasing his coat the same way it had when he was seven and wore that ridiculous red rain jacket. The original photo showed him mid-laugh, arms stretched, soaked from a jump into the shallow edge. He tried to capture that joy again — same jacket (a tight fit now), same laugh, even tried to get splashed for authenticity. He set the timer. Smiled. Waited for the shutter snap.

Nothing.

He checked the lens. Battery was full. Tried again. Still silence. The photo preview showed a stark white blur. Just fog. No Thomas.

He brought the camera to a repair shop. They ran diagnostics, shrugged, said it worked perfectly. No issues found. Thomas assumed it was a fluke. But when he returned to try again — at the lake, at the swing, even in his own apartment — the same thing happened. The world appeared, clear and crisp. But where he should’ve been? Nothing. No face. No blur. Just… absence.

Days passed. He tried selfies. Mirrors. Phone cameras. Polaroids. All the same. He had become invisible to the lens. His reflection in mirrors still looked back, but fainter now — thinner around the edges, like an overexposed photo. He called his sister. Asked her to take a picture. She blinked at the result: just the couch, the lamp behind it, the shape of a cushion where he had been sitting. “Are you playing a trick on me?” she asked, her voice cracking with unease.

He stopped going to work. He didn’t know how to explain it. His body remained tangible, but the world had stopped recording him. Conversations felt slower. People didn’t make eye contact as often. The barista called out his order with hesitation — “Tall latte for… someone?” One day, he looked into a mirror and watched his reflection glitch, just for a second — like static over flesh.

He turned to the photos — his perfect recreations. They were still there. Dozens of them, untouched by time. Him at five with scraped knees. Him at sixteen, awkward and hopeful. Him at thirty, clinging to youth. They smiled back at him with unwavering permanence. But when he tried to take a new photo, one of the now — even without recreating anything — nothing came out.

It was as if time had drawn a line and said: enough.

Weeks blurred. His phone no longer recognized his face ID. His shadow on the pavement grew faint. The world seemed to be forgetting him — and, in turn, he felt himself unraveling. Like maybe the act of preserving memories had consumed his ability to make new ones.

One morning, he woke up to find his voice softer, almost muffled, as if the air no longer carried it properly. When he touched the old photographs, they felt warmer than his skin. The boy in them felt more real than the man standing over them.

In the final days, he stood before his bookshelf, every photo perfectly aligned — a visual biography of someone slowly ceasing to exist. He ran a hand down the spines of the albums. Whispered the names of places, people, memories like prayers. He wondered what would happen when he disappeared entirely. Would the photos remain? Or would they fade too, as if he’d never been?

And then, on the morning of what would’ve been his forty-fourth birthday, the photos were gone. The frames were still on the shelf, the glass intact, the labels untouched — but the images inside had turned blank. Just light and paper. As if they’d never been printed at all.

Thomas stood in the empty apartment, surrounded by invisible memories, wondering if this was the price of resisting time: that eventually, it forgets you right back.