Smiles

Photographs of us from years ago are shiny and physical. Those memories had corners and datestamps, whether the camera's doing or the pen's ink on the back. When they developed, they came out with smiles, lips pixellated in the crescent shape we still recognise happiness by. That was me, as a boy, holding a stick of wheat or something, smiling at the black circle my mum was holding. That was you, uncontrollably smiling because you were only a few months old, but your dad's smile was a genuine smile. Above his glasses, he has laugh lines, the crenellations of joy carved above his eyes and a little bit to the side. 

The us we are now, looking back, smile too at the intricacies of seeing ourselves in the third person. Pudgy cheeks. Faded pink dress. Minuscule hyphenated eyes. Those smiles remind us that, then, we were happy. We stopped in the middle of our happiness, in those flashed moments, to bracket our happiness and store it in cyllindrical jars that would later be stored onto shiny, cornered paper, behind shiny plastic film glued down on three edges of four, inside shiny books.

Looking back, we encounter those middles of happiness and tip into an alluring nostalgia where our reshuffled memories suddenly perch in the correct emotional order alongside those faces. We remember things about that time. Whose hat it actually was that I was wearing. That you went to school with her, but that she's now a bitch.

We reflect off the photographic sheen. But we are not there. Those first-person moments became third-person gatherings of archived rememberances, put together in first-person by a third person, the rememberer, who in the moment of recollection manages to straddle both what happened and what is happening to stretch out the smile from then, to the then that is being remembered now, in the moment of looking at the photograph.

That smile was a first-person smile, when it was smiled. Onwards, it can but be third-person. That feeling of smiling that made that smile happen, that is a flash.