Letters to those eyes I have met, I have loved, and I have left

Tu me manques. Mais je ne peux pas vous dire: bonjour, salut, comme ça va? Vous êtes pour moi comme la lune ou bien l’espace— une réalité que je ne comprends plus. Tu me manques. Je ne vais jamais dire cela en ce monde matériel, donc je tiens les mots dans ma bouche avant les photographies de mon enfance que tu as pris, et je les dis en les langues que tu ne comprennes pas. Ici je peux vous regardez encore, ici, en le temps sans temps, vous êtes ici encore.

Mais bien, que reste-t-il de nos amours? 

Waqt waits for no one. In its relentless deluge, we are spent. We look at photographs and think wistfully, embarrassingly, regretfully, of moments in which we find ourselves captured. And yet, as I do myself in the personal reflection above, contemplating the loss, yearning, and eventual re-encounter through photographs of someone who was once loved, there is a certain unbearable loveliness to the pain of regarding time begone. Though it is only natural that as we grow and evolve, so too do the people in our lives. Such change can lead to partings, induced by the inevitability of time or the matter-of-fact reality of aging.

But through photographs, we once again glimpse all those who have informed our lives. Once again do we meet their eyes. The recollection of their scent and smile overwhelm, looking across time in that liminal space where chronology collapses, a heady feat of science and art combined. Here we see: a childhood friend whose name has not passed lips since the cusp of adulthood, a beloved who lives on in folded notes tucked into secret jacket linings, a grandmother who laughs with a secret in her mouth, a father that has become a stranger. How surreal it is to hold stacks of prints, scroll through an endless backup on our phones and see people once familiar as the palms of our hands now distant as the moon.

When I was eighteen, I fell in love. I realized this in retrospection, two years after we had departed from each other’s lives. For whatever reason—our general youthful ineptitude, perhaps—by silent mutual agreement, we never spoke upon the subject.

Afterwards, as the years passed, when I could no longer hold the tone of their voice in my head, the expression upon their face when I told a sly joke, I conjured the possibility of dialogue instead. Whistles of the wind felt like exhales, the sound of my name. We held entire conversations without saying a word. And when I longed for their presence, I turned to another world, lost in histories of the Umayyad desert palaces, Ai Khanoum and the markets of the round city of Baghdad, places somehow faintly familiar, tinged with my memories of them. We could not talk, I having lost them long before, they having let me go in return, so I searched for their amused, tolerating, kind eyes a millennia ago.

This is what I mean to say here: though we do not speak, I remember. I clutch our photographs when spaces emptied of your memory palpitate with absence. I remember what it was like, with stolen fish curry from your plate, the clitter clatter of coins and poetry composed, sung at gravelly tenors, unbearable laughter and comfortable silence, sticky mango of summertime—I remember it all.

—

“A Meeting of Eyes” describes the method of regard in vernacular photography: the photographer capturing their subject(s), subjects caught within the frame looking at each other, the viewer’s gaze upon the subject(s) as shot by their photographer, and so forth. The everyday photographs of the family, preserved or lost, will be a source of inspiration for this column, to explore how we have recorded the lives of our loved ones since the invention of the family camera. From my own archive and beyond, I will also examine subject(s) veiled from intimacy, taken by people perhaps unknown to them. This is an exercise in meditation: on the interaction between the self and family (biological and/or chosen), place and space, and the camera.

The title of the column is also a reference to the sensorial experience of exactly what is described: a meeting of eyes. Through short pieces of serialized fiction, we will explore the deeply interconnected relationships of childhood that fall apart and may weave themselves back together again.