Sidra Dahhan, Skeletal Photographs

Skeletal Photographs

Sidra Dahhan

Mona lugged out a heavy, leather-bound photo album from the back of the bottom bookshelf and set it on her lap. For a moment, she observed the embroidered white flower petals falling from a browning stem on the book’s black cover. Her heavy heart fell with the petals, dreading yet yearning to do what she knew she was about to.

She started to gingerly sift through the pages. What once was a book rich with years of memories now laid bare, with translucent sleeves holding page after page of blank, white photographs. The album sat empty with the souls of lost moments.

The blanched spots where colorful photos brimming with humans once rested were a reminder of Mona’s weakness. The truth was that she was, and had long been, unable to merely look at the souvenirs, at tangible pieces of memory. For this, she was left with pages of skeletal remains. She could not recall in detail all the mysterious moments that she had lived and lost twice.

She reached a page near the end, and paused on the lone remaining photograph.

The woman sitting at the center of the image was dressed in a soft, silky blue shirt, unaware that a picture was being taken. She was dreamily staring off into something beautiful in the distance, entranced for reasons unknown. Her mouth opened slightly, eternally captured mid sentence. Perhaps she was whispering her praise of a glorious view to the person behind the camera, or she was passively singing a lullaby to the child she was holding in her lap with one arm.

The child was maybe two or three years old, and she seemed to be struggling to keep her eyes open. Most of her body lay limp on her mother as she let herself relax. Her hands, however, were tense, as she gripped on to her mother’s shirt as if she was afraid that she would disappear.

Mona’s fingers absently traced the woman in the photograph, as she desperately drank in the image with her eyes. The weightless piece of paper dominated over her senses and rendered her powerless. Still, she resisted the creeping, intrusive voice itching the back of her mind, for she was determined to fool herself. Determined to believe that she was capable of absorbing the snapshot the old fashioned way; to become the child within without sacrificing the photograph. She longed to be merciful and give the image a chance to live, and not die like all of the others for her own greed.

But the child was not her. And it taunted her that that ungrateful, inanimate being got to forever exist in a perfect memory, while she was regulated to being an observer, unable to grab onto the moment.

That is when Mona made an impetuous decision to be selfish to her future self. Her favorite, and only, photograph with the woman was marred by her hatred, not for the woman, but for Mona’s mirror image, who greedily reaped the benefits of eternal contact with her. Mona was jealous. Resentful. And in that moment, she decided she would rather live one moment as the child than be forever reminded of what she could never experience just by observing.

Mona tore the image from its plastic sleeve, leaving one last blank space behind in the empty album. What remained was an album that was ready to be reborn with newly taken images, or to perish with all of its past memories erased forever.

Moving on to her desk, Mona opened up the book-sized photo extractor from where it had laid unused, yet ready to operate, for years, and she placed the image inside. She observed as the image’s ink slowly melted into a pool of color in the transparent container below it. The liquid had a blue tinge to it. The blue of the sky, or of the azure blouse. As the ink droplets slowed down from a cool rain to reluctant, stray tears, to then nothing at all, Mona detached the container from the extractor and poured the liquid out into a dime-sized hole of a headset.

Then, she placed the metallic machine over her head and raised a finger over the familiar button near her left ear. She hesitated. As much as she wanted to press the button and experience the image, she was afraid of not capturing the moment perfectly. She was afraid of being disappointed, and of having saved an inconsequential moment as her last one. She was afraid of wasting her only opportunity to live the photograph. She did not know how long it would last, a moment, a minute, a day. Nor if the woman would recognize her beyond the child she no longer was. Nor if she wanted her to recognize her in that way.

Before she could question herself any further, her finger betrayed her and pushed the button.

She could smell jasmine. Not perfume, but the flower. A musky scent she seemed to have smelt only in long ago dreams, a smell she had not known she would recognize as immediately as she had. She wanted to cry.

Then, she felt her hands weaken against the slippery fabric she was holding onto. She gripped on tighter, desperately trying to keep hold.

She heard a booming laugh over her head as her world started shaking and her hands detached from the silk. But one of the woman’s arms kept her in place, tightly hugging her. The woman was not humming a soft lullaby or whispering, as the stillness of the photo had led Mona to imagine. Instead, the woman was animated; she was alive. Remembering the woman’s awed expression to a sight off camera, Mona turned her head to the direction she was looking at. She wanted to see the spectacular sights that had haunted her imagination and dreams for years.

She saw nothing. Well, nothing of significance. All she saw was a cracked, beige cement wall in an unfamiliar place.

Still processing the mundanity of the moment, Mona was startled as the woman above her started shouting. No, she was only speaking, loudly and joyfully recounting a story of what seemed to be her past. A memory of her own. She was not looking at Mona, but to the man setting down a camera onto the table between them. A memory, that was the beautiful thing the woman was looking at.

Mona watched as the man grabbed a sunflower seed from the small ceramic bowl on the table. She heard a crack, and a small clink as he threw the empty shell into a second bowl. She heard a beautiful melody, composed as the seeds opened and fell into the bowl, as the man ate them and the woman released her spirited voice. While the seeds moved at a soothing, repetitive, and dependable pace, the woman’s words disappeared into the air as soon as they were told, dying as ghostly echoes as she simultaneously produced more and more lively sounds.

Finally, Mona looked up to the woman and gleaned at her actions. Her blue eyes gleamed as she spoke, not exactly sparkling, but shining.

They were half here, half adrift in her own memory. They shifted between warmly acknowledging the man, and brightly acknowledging forgotten snippets of the past. Her voice wavered with emotion and strained at the exertion of remembrance, and the arm not hugging Mona danced along with her story. But then, the woman paused, hand midair, and eyes frozen. She was lost. Confused. There was a gap within her memory.

And that’s when Mona cried. Cried for her empathy in the moment. Cried for her sorrow of her own damaged recollection of the past. The woman’s eyes shifted down to her with furrowing brows as she acknowledged but still did not look at her. Instead, her attention was placed on reprimanding the man.

“Stop letting her stay up past her bedtime! Look at her, she barely slept, she’s exhausted.”

Mona sniffled, trying not to ruin the moment with her tears. She hugged the woman, as tightly as her little body was capable of hugging, deceptively strong. She felt the woman stiffen, bewildered, yet placing her other arm around her for a complete hug.

The man chuckled. “Looks fine to me.”

The woman shot him a glare as she began to bounce the girl on her leg, shushing her last few tears away.

“Mama,” Mona whispered feebly. The word felt strange, foreign.

She had the woman’s full attention now. But Mona could no longer speak, even if she wanted to, for her head started to spin. She knew this was the end. She knew this was goodbye. And all she could do was stare as the

waterworks came back and overwhelmed her tongue and senses with saltiness. She hated herself for wasting her last moment on something seemingly so mundane, something she would not remember. She hated herself for being weak, and for wasting an eternal snapshot for a spotty memory. For exchanging a goldmine of photographs for the false reality of memory. She hated herself for not committing to a meaningful goodbye.

Mona then realized that she could no longer smell the sweet jasmine, and that the cracking of sunflower seeds was no longer audible. She became increasingly near sighted as the world lost its shape around her. Even the plain wall was less vivid than it was a moment before. The man was fading. The silkiness of the woman’s shirt as well. The woman’s questioning gaze disappeared, as well as her face. She was gone.

Mona saw white, and another image became a skeleton to be placed inside the album that would forevermore tantalize her for what it once was.