Photo Reality

Creating the composite of me.

Memorizing places and dates,

reading lists and diaries.

Searching the faces of the pictures of me.

Creating an entry for each event.

Like my life is some great test,

and the answers are forgotten events.

Finding an album nearly empty.

Once full, only containing one picture of me.

A perfect representation of my reality.

A single photograph. I can Identify me,

where we are, how old I might be.

Though there are no real memories.

Like memorized lines for a play

or words on a long-passed spelling test.

I know it used to be, but it is as if it never was.

No matter how many pictures I look at,

how many lines I’m fed, I don’t

know me now.

I’m not sure I ever did.

If every part of me was constructed,

suggested, and memorized from another’s mind.

Where did I ever exist?

There never was one, a me, an I.

I am a figment, just a wisp.

K.B Silver

This explores the distress and negative feelings that arise from seeing photos of myself. Recently I found a photo album that used to be filled with pictures, probably of me, that only had 1 picture left in it. I have no idea where all the other pictures went, if they had people in them that upset me and I had to get rid of the other pictures, or what? I looked through the few pictures I had, like I have many times before, reciting the other people in the pictures, how old I was, where we were, etc. This is how I have kept the little real information and a few memories I did have from my childhood alive.