How Sepia Snapshots Evoke Newfound Memories

Photographs have a way of opening floodgates of emotions. Even if you’re not the one in them.

Four-decades old sepia snapshots are spread in a blanket of nostalgia on my bed. Weddings, vacations, lazy Sunday afternoons—every other moment is captured into tangibility, in essence visible only to the ones that populate them. Photographs have a way of weaving stories for me. With their tell-tale quality they reflect on old truths, revealing new stories to my young eyes.

Till now, I had only appreciated photographs for their ability to take me back to my past life. But today I realise their ability to divulge secrets that were never mine to know. In the coy smiles they exude a politeness I have never found in me. In the boy cuts and sweater vests they hold a freedom I can never taste. In the new versions of old faces I have known all my life, these photographs display a life I know nothing of. My own infantile happiness is an experience unknown to me, and that comes as another realisation I wasn’t prepared for.

In the presentation of these photographs I find my nascent pride collapsing, the vanity of my existence shredding to bits. I may be 21 and full of ideas, and there may be secrets I hold that the world will never know. But the world has already come and gone a million times and more, and my life is only a consequence of two of its lives already at their peaks. In their curls I find the texture of my mane, in their jokes I discover my sense of humour, in their actions lie my experiences, and it’s in their intrinsic making that the secret map to my essence is hidden. I guess it’s possible that I could know all my truth yet never be in sync with the truth of the cosmos. Because while for me the universe is all my first experiences, the universe has already devoured me a thousand times over.