Caitlin Crum
When I was a kid, taking my picture was a hassle. The flash was too bright, and smiling made my cheeks hurt. There are quite a few photos, mostly hanging in my childhood home, where I look as if I’ve just eaten a lemon, eyes squinted, pained by the thought of having to look presentable. Why on God’s green earth would anyone need a picture of me, when they could see my face every day? Certainly there must have been better ways to save the memories from when I was small than to force me into a lace dress and set me on top of a giant number 2 and make me smile like I was the happiest child in the world, when really it was just the photographer looking ridiculous with a stuffed dog on top of his bald head.
School pictures were even worse. Nobody ever looked nice enough, and parading 700 students in and out of the band room probably didn’t give those photographers the inspiration to make all of us look nicer. Out of thirteen years of over-posed, inconsistent photos I only like the ones I took my senior year of high school. My school allowed us to submit our own photos, so I took them all over town—in places I cared about, places I loved more than anything—instead of sitting up straight on a stool in front of a green screen, with over-combed hair and a fake-as-anything smile on my face. I never understood why my family wanted so badly to keep those untrue photos, to spread them to my kin like some kind of glossy-paper plague. They were ugly; they were hideous; I was hideous.
In 2014, I was sitting at my desk, in a too-small dorm working on some assignment that probably has no bearing on life now. My dad called and I picked up the phone like always, expecting the similar dance of conversation. He asked me how classes were, if I hated my roommate yet and how much coffee I was drinking to stay alive. There was a long pause, followed by a “There’s something you need to know” and a drop in my stomach like a fall from an eight story building. It was then that I understood why they kept all those ugly, worn-out, touched-up photos: they froze time. We lost my mom to brain cancer four months after that phone call, and in that time, I printed more pictures of her than I’ve ever printed in my life. I hung them up around my room, like a shrine to who she was. They hung on every wall, door, flat and vertical surface I could find because I wanted the photos to remember her. The photos don’t remember her puffy face, or her hospital visits, or her incoherent babbling; those things weren’t my mom. They remember her love for coyotes, us singing in the kitchen before dinner, her glasses and long fingernails. In those photos, she is glossy.
There is one in my bedroom, printed and framed, of her clad in a red sweatshirt, holding me, a toddler with a bowl haircut and a flashing grin on my face. I don’t remember the photo being taken, but there it sits, asking to be looked at. It was a sunny Saturday in September. My family was on Mackinac Island, visiting, and I was three years old. I’m being held by my mother because I never wanted to take the photo in the first place; I am facing backwards in pure protest. It’s funny, when I think about it, that picture I don’t remember taking—and didn’t want to be in—holds so tightly a grip on my memory. It’s a piece of frozen time for me to hold in my hands like a hundreds-of-years-old document of who we were on September 17th, 1999, softly lit by sunlight sprawling through orange-brown trees. She holds me tightly, like nothing could possibly happen that might tear us away from each other, our matching outfits a reminder that we are just carbon copies of the same stubbornness, the same quick wit, the same too-loud voice. I don’t remember the photo, but the photo remembers me, and I remember my mom because of it; I am warmed by her eyes, encouraged by her smile and transfixed by the way I look just like her now, like I instead am the piece of frozen time that keeps her here.