On Looking Again #3 We Don't Know So Much About Ourselves

For the longest time, I thought I knew why I loved this photograph.

It was simple.

Two little boys, who are more like brothers than friends, had climbed over me on a sofa. One on either side. Neither paying any attention to the camera. Just an ordinary afternoon, interrupted for a second by Dee pressing the shutter.

I loved it because it was full of affection.

Or so I thought.

Today, looking at it again, another photograph quietly surfaced.

It has lived in my memory for decades, though I haven't seen it in just as long.

My father is sitting on a maroon sofa in the ‘drawing room’ of our government flat sometime in the eighties. My elder brother is leaning against one side of him. I am on the other. I must have been four, my arms hugging him across his tummy. Almost the same age as Adu is here. My brother, three years older than me, roughly the same age as Y.

That photograph no longer exists.

Somewhere along the way, my family's photographs disappeared. Moves, time, neglect…whatever the reason, our visual history survives only in memory now.

Except, perhaps, it doesn't.

Perhaps it survives here too.

I had always believed I loved this photograph because it captured something beautiful in the present.

It never occurred to me that I might have loved it because it was quietly reminding my heart of something it had already lost.

We don't know so much about ourselves.

We like to think we understand why a particular song makes us stop what we're doing, why a certain smell feels like home, why one photograph keeps drawing us back while a hundred others fade into the archive.

Maybe we don't.

Maybe our lives are held together by invisible threads that only reveal themselves years later, when one ordinary photograph reaches across time and takes the hand of another.

One that no longer exists anywhere except inside us.