6:30pm. two days ago i shuffled through my box of photos for recent pictures of family and friends. i realized with dismay that most of my pictures predate my wedding over 5 years ago. i have a few pictures of my nephews; one picture is framed and sitting on my bookshelf. somehow, the pictures i have awaken a sharp sense of loneliness. normally, my solitary evenings don't bother me; i find a great sense of peace from being alone for the first significant amount of time all day. as much as a love my students, i crave solitude by the time the last bell rings. but this is different, now, with darkness fully settled, and memories hovering over me. loved ones with placid photo-smiles who may or may not have known at the time of the click how short their lives would be. photos are always so deceiving - they lead you to trust in permanence. and i wish, sometimes, that when people die they would vanish from the pictures. somehow, the foggy blurry quality of memory hurts less acutely than visual clarity the way being punched in the chest hurts less than being stabbed.
i've decided that this is the year of sorrows. beginning with deaths and disillusionments and stretching into more deaths? worse, i think, is not the deaths, but the slow, deliberate inevitability of it. incremental and stronger than our ability to block. i think i prefer the sudden ones - i've had more experience with them, and in a way, they seem less menacing for being utterly abrupt.
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