The Photo Album
daniel rand
I was buying some beer and whiskey at the market,
when I saw a photo album on sale.
It was big and cheap, so I bought it.
When I got home,
I dumped out all my photos on to the bed.
They were in a crumpled paper bag.
The photos reminded me of
how many different ways I had suffered.
I had forgotten about the family, the women,
the co-workers, the friends, the acquaintances,
the places I had lived,
the places I had frequented,
the vacations . . .
If this is my life at a glance, I thought,
I've lived a pretty shitty life.
I drank some whiskey, had a couple of beers and
just stared at the pictures.
There are the aunts and uncles and cousins playing with
somebody's baby and laughing. They're all living for a future
which will forget them immediately after their deaths.
There are the women:
Jean, Nicole, Marcia, Jenny, Robin, Alice, Patty, Rosie,
with their well-practiced smiles and precious egos.
They're as fragile as peanut brittle.
There are the factory workers,
trying to make the best out of a ten minute lunch break,
by bringing donuts on Fridays and retelling
old jokes which they heard when they were children.
They're trapped forever in their jobs.
There are the friends who turned into strangers
when they married.
There's Joe's wife who drinks perfume and
Brandy's husband whose role model is Mr. Rogers.
Stifled by their imagination,
they've come to enjoy going grocery shopping
or buying expensive gourmet kitchen items,
like garlic presses, fondue forks, salad dryers.
There are the acquaintances: Karl the truck driver,
Brian the bear, pretty Peter and Helen of Troy --
they're all basket cases looking for someone to stabilize them
because their own lives overwhelm them.
By now the beer and whiskey were sinking in and
the truth behind the pictures was beginning to unfold:
there are a lot of slow, agonizing suicides out there.
The thought cheered me up considerably,
as I put the pictures in the photo album.
