Pictures of You: Myfanwy Collins

I remember the adults at the after-wake playing a tape recording of my dead father as he told stories. All the drunk people listening to the tape were laughing. I didn’t understand then that they were laughing because they were sad. It was right there. His voice. If I try really hard, I can catch bits of it at the tops of my ears, but then they blink away.

After my mother died, I kept a voicemail from her on my phone for a long time. My husband tried to save it for me but now it’s long gone, too. Then I saw her in a video from years and years before, walking, alive, and there was her voice. Her voice. I never wanted to let go but the tape began unraveling and was lost.

The smell lingers on clothing, in bedding. This is probably what you first knew of the people who cared for you when you were newly born, their smell. Their voices were more muffled to your new ears. You were used to listening through fluid, through skin. Your eyes unfocused. You knew them by the scent that is so unmistakably their own. That scent that you only notice in their absence. A puff of smoke, like magic. My mother has been dead for fourteen years and I still have a scarf of hers that I take out and smell every once in a while if I am feeling like I must. It is a small torture. I am that baby again, reaching up to her.More slowly the image whispers away, coming to you in dreams, and lingering in the photos you stumble across in boxes you’ve moved from one house to the next. Old embossed albums. Yearbooks. Photos stuffed into unopened drawers.

When my mother died, my sisters gave me the family photographs to watch over. Every so often I go into a frenzy when I must pull them all out and look through them, feeling everything with each photo. I see my parents for how young they were. I see their humanity. I also see their pride, their mistakes, their fear. And I see myself. It takes a while for me to let go and see the beauty of the moment. To see when we might have been happy and having fun. Mostly, I see the sadness of my childhood. The shame of my youth. The anger of my young adulthood. The self-pity. Oh, the self-pity. The ugliness. The rage.

I do not want to hide these parts of myself, though some of them are too painful to share. Some of them bring me too keenly back to who I was instead of allowing me to exist as I am.

This unraveling and unveiling, though, is what intrigues and inspires me when people share their old photos on social media. Here is when you show me your real face. Not the carefully chosen profile picture. Not the avatar. Instead, I see you in your most vulnerable moment. At your happiest. I see you during a time in childhood when you felt alone. I see your true, goofy self. I see you when you weren’t quite so serious and when life wasn’t quite so hard. Or I see you when life was much harder. I see you as a young adult when you thought you knew it all but from the photo we can all now see that you were still clearly so small and unaware. I see your face in the faces of your ancestors. The ones who came before.

I see you.

And here, in this series, “Pictures of You,” I’ve asked a group of writers to share a meaningful photograph and then to write about the photo in whatever form (fiction, non-fiction, poetry). For the month of March, we will be sharing their photos and their words on this blog. I am very proud to share with you what these writers have produced and I am honored that they trusted me with their words.

Thank you, writers, for your pictures and your words. And thank you Sheila Squillante and PANK for this opportunity.

Writers, this is exactly how I wanted to see you. I wanted to know you as that bright young thing, as that buffoon. I wanted to know your lost parents. I wanted your bad haircut and your ugly prom dress. I wanted your crooked bangs and your grandmother’s kisses. I wanted to know the treacherous path you followed and are maybe even still following.

Take me on that path with you, writer. I will follow you anywhere.

 — Myfanwy Collins

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Myfanwy Collins has published a novel, ECHOLOCATION (Engine Books, 2012), a collection of short fiction, I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND (PANK Books, 2013), and has a young adult novel, THE BOOK OF LANEY, forthcoming from Lacewing Books in March, 2015. Please visit her at: http://www.myfanwycollins.com