The Heaviest Photographs

Or, what to do with all the pictures from my first wedding

Photo by Kirk Cameron on Unsplash

I have two photo albums

— big hulking black things coated in faux leather — that I move around the house periodically. They are too tall for a lot of shelves and often end up stacked upon one another. Whatever the covers are made of has started to degrade, so they stick to each other and leave a gummy residue on my hands when I pry them apart to relocate them to what I hope is a better, less-obtrusive spot. I hardly ever open them to gaze at the photos inside. They are from my first wedding.

Throwing photos away, no matter the subjects, feels like sacrilege — as if I am disrespecting those people and settings, disrespecting even the technician who printed them and the high-quality photo paper on which they reside. Even when those photos are holiday cards I never mailed or leftover school wallets of my children looking not at all like they look in real life.

I’ve been rereading You Are Here, by Thich Nhat Hanh, and thinking about Buddhism a lot again lately. I recognize this conflict within me — the need to cast off clutter to feel lighter pitted against the craving obligation to physical treasures — as attachment. It’s like Gollum and Marie Kondo are arguing in my head every time I come across a stack of photos stuffed in a drawer that don’t elicit nostalgia but feelings of burden.

This takes up space in my brain, time sitting on the floor in conflict, and energy doing the same. Energy repeatedly relocating those heavy black tomes that don’t fit anywhere. But feelings are feelings and while I would like to let go of this particular kind of attachment — the kind that reeks of tiresome obligation — my heart simply won’t do it. Not yet.

Of course photo albums from a first marriage that ended badly can carry extra messy baggage. These used to. But twenty years after the divorce, seven or eight years ago, we met, hugged, talked, and found some closure. This he initiated shortly before he died. I am hugely grateful for that one meeting, that chance to connect and acknowledge how we fell short for one another back then.

Because of that meeting and the passage of time, I no longer feel a sharp stab to the heart when I consider the wedding photos safely preserved within the pages of those bulky books. I opened them briefly just the other day and smiled. I saw a happy night, surrounded by friends and family. It was cold and rainy for our outdoor celebration. The weather had distressed me earlier in the day, but the wedding was beautiful and fun all the same. Family and friends have a way of saving the day. The photographer did a fantastic job.

And still, what the fuck do I do with these things?

I toy with the idea of disassembling them — keeping a few of the photos by some other storage method and tossing the the disintegrating albums. Or I could cover them with colorful contact paper to hide the stickiness from my eyes and hands. Maybe I’ll build a fire in our backyard pit and throw them in, return them to the earth, the toxic chemicals released to my lungs be damned. Perhaps I could bury them, make them compost; they’ve already started falling apart. Or maybe I will keep moving them from closet to shelf to different shelf for the rest of my life.

What I can’t bring myself to do? Toss them in the garage trashcan to be hauled off to the dump and sit there amongst styrafoam containers, junk mail, and broken refrigerators in a dystopian mountain range of garbage while rats scurry across them on their way to something more edible. (That’s a macabre imagining tinged by guilt that doesn’t really represent objective reality.)

These photos are not my first, volatile marriage or the man who shared it with me. They are not me or even my memories. They are not to be worshiped. They are paper and ink that used to be trees and other natural elements that will be that again one day. But still, I am human, and photos, while they are not memories, are memory tools. All that prior experience is within me. All my prior selves. I contain multitudes. But sometimes it helps to have a physical thing, a photo, to draw those multitudes to the surface.

A few days ago, I heaved the albums down from the top shelf of my office closet to get at something behind them. This is when I ended up sitting on the floor flipping through them and smiling. Later, our bearded dragon was scurrying around, and I stacked them against my cedar chest so she could climb to the window sill. They happened to catch my eye when I was casting about.

Irrelevant wedding albums repurposed as lizard stairs.

That’s where they are now, days later, on the floor behind the chair I sit in now.

I can’t tell you what I will ultimately decide about this inconveniently heavy yet sweet collection of memories. Though for at least the next several days, they will reside where they are now on the floor. I’ve got things to do besides stewing about the disintegrating evidence of my past. I have a camping trip to plan.

One day, I think, I’ll let these things go, stop hauling them around. Or at least I’ll dismantle them, allow them to shrink to a more portable form. But sometimes, all you can do is let something lie on your floor in a dusty corner, where you are always, on some level, aware of it, until you are ready to truly see it and release it.