Holes in a Picture Book, By Tom
I looked through an album of us the other day.
Where your face usually appeared I found discrete regions of negative space, shaping themselves into contours where your eyes, nose, mouth, and ears used to be. Line, shape, and color mixed together to suggest something that didn’t exist; the shape of a face with no owner, flattened onto paper.
Your hair had been replaced meticulously with silhouettes of grey and black lines, at various angles, colored and textured exactly to produce in a two-dimensional film the appearance of hair where, in fact, there was only the shadow image on film. I had forgotten, until seeing it, that your hair had not always been grey.
I can almost remember the way it felt to be held by you as a child, or the way your voice could snap my whole body into silence and stillness. Today I see less of you in the montage of our lives; I see the meals, laundry, bills, and headaches. I see the work that I amounted to, see myself next to you now, and can observe there is no connection.
You couldn’t endure long enough to see if all the work I amounted to paid off.