Frozen In Time

So many years gone. Time evaporates like sweat on a summer morning in Death Valley. I was cleaning my office last week when I came across a hard drive of images dated from 2905 to 2016. Video too. Images capture time like a mosquito in amber. I could look at some pictures and tell you the date--not simply birthdays and holidays-but special days. Yesterday I brought the hard drive downstairs and plugged it into my laptop . 

Looking at these images of the family in happy times touch my heart--to be sure. However, clicking through the pictures I felt like an archeologist looking at a lost civilization. The children are adults, not the kids in the images. My mom, Jenny's parents dead, but smiling back at me in picture after picture. On the

Photo from an old hard drive.
computer screen.  My happy, beautiful family. Jenny engaged in parenting like a hummingbird bird harvesting nectar hovering over a flower.

Traveling in Canada, the East Coast, New York, Europe, San Francisco, Lake Crescent, Long Beach, Maui and on and on and on it went. Some pictures brought back memories I hadn't realized I had. I went through folder after folder marveling at the pictures, of the life once lived.

I was systematically going folder to folder. Each folder had a generic, computer generated name. The images in the last folder I looked at were tnt remarkably different from the others--mundane stuff really. Family life. Our apartment on Gwinn, wainscotting, views of the lake and the UW, unbelievably beautiful. That tingly happy feeling that pleasant memories bring--that shot of dopamine--hit over and again as I scrolled through the data and days.

The pictures were from 2014. April. The month that Leiney had first showed signs of deep depression. Lots of pictures of the interior of the Gwinn apartment. I am clicking through the pictures when I come across pictures taken in the master bedroom. The pictures were clearly taken by Jenny. I am laying next to Jenny in bed. I am holding and staring at my iPad (where did that go?) laying stage right on the bed. Jenny is naked--or at least topless, with the duvet cover pulled up to just below the shoulders. I clicked through, and the next picture. It is Jenny. looking longingly into the camera, shoulder to neck in the image. She has a come hither look on her face. And so it began.  She didn't take that picture for me. It wasn't some innocent vanity shot. I am grateful that she moved to Signal and Snapchat at some point. These pictures . . . "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." 

I plan on making copies of the hard drive for the kids, who likely have seen almost none of the pictures. Now, I find myself having to go through every folder to make sure there are no more "thirst trap" photos for el pinche sitting there like little time bombs.

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