Old photographs

“Do you ever wish that you could hit the rewind button and live in moments from your life again?” Noel asked as she looked up at her husband, Mark, from her seat on the living room floor. She was surrounded by piles of old photographs. Old photographs from her childhood that she had taken on an old, disposable camera. Photographs of awkward smiling teenage friends that she hadn’t spoken to in probably twenty years, even though they had accepted each other as friends on Facebook long ago. Photographs of Noel in her wedding dress, feeling beautiful and the happiest she’d ever felt in her life. She was doing her best to sort through them, dividing them into neat piles based on the periods of her life before finally putting them into the new, white photo albums, where they would likely stay, untouched for another decade.

“I think everyone feels that way when they look at old photos,” her husband, Mark responded without taking his eyes off of his phone as he scrolled through social media. He had bored himself watching her sift through the shoeboxes filled with pictures long ago. It was a chore he could have accomplished in an hour, yet it had been taking her all afternoon to accomplish. 

The shoeboxes of photographs had been forgotten in a closet since they had moved into their apartment together. It was their first apartment together. That was ten years ago. It was home to so many memories for them. The first time they hosted a dinner party for their small group of friends. The apartment had witnessed their first blowup argument when they had nearly broken up, yet he couldn’t remember what the argument was even about now. In that little apartment, they had grown closer than ever as they shared their fears during the pandemic as it swept across the globe. He remembered her pulling out those same photographs during the holidays the first year they lived together. They had been drinking too much red wine that night, listening to old Christmas music, as she prepared him to see her relatives the following day at Christmas. She had laughed, showing him the old photos of her as a baby getting her first bath, the ones of her joyfully riding her big wheel in front of her old house in the suburbs. Then as she flipped through the pictures of her as a teen, she stopped laughing and put the photos back into the shoebox, muttering something about not wanting to bore him with old family photos any longer.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But, it’s not the moments in the photographs I want to relive necessarily. They just spark other memories from when I was that age, that I want to revisit, like riding in the car with my mom, singing along to Whitney Houston while driving through the city before it became this unrecognizable, gentrified version that it is today. That would be a million times better than looking at these old pictures.” 

She sighed as she began to slide another photograph into the album, one of her sitting on her dad’s lap, wearing his old Chicago Cubs baseball hat that nearly swallowed her entire head. She was finally tackling a project that had been on her to-do list for months, putting these old photos into albums to make their impending move across the country a little easier to prepare for the following month. It always made her sad to look at these pictures. They brought back a flood of emotions that she normally tried to keep packed away somewhere in the dark corners of her mind. The old photos of her sisters, in particular, made her the saddest. She considered throwing them away, since every time she looked at them she wanted to hide in her bed and cry, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them in the trash. They were reminders of how close the three of them were growing up. There weren’t a lot of happy memories in that house, but the happiest were the ones of them making up silly games to play in the backyard or trying to scare each other with silly ghost stories they told each other. They were there for each other, every day back then. Whether it was telling each other jokes to cheer up the one who had the worst time that day, or simply holding each other while one of them cried.

“I don’t understand why I was such a camera-happy kid. I guess I didn’t realize I would be sentenced to lugging these photos around for the rest of my life, from home to home. I mean, eventually when I die, someone is just going to throw these in the trash anyway. They don’t mean anything to anyone but me, really. And, they just make me so fucking sad,” her voice began to quiver as a hot, fat tear finally ran down her cheek. She wiped the tear away with the back of her hand, angry at it for betraying her will to keep her emotions hampered.

“You know, you don’t have to deal with those photos right now,” Mark said after hearing the emotion in her voice. He suddenly felt guilty for giving Twitter so much attention that he didn’t notice her getting upset. It wasn’t often that Noel cried, but it was always at random times. She wouldn’t cry during an argument, even if he had done something to hurt her, like staying out all night with his friends without texting or calling. Instead, she would cry over a commercial, or for seemingly no reason at all. He was grateful that he had only seen her cry a handful of times because each time she did it felt like his heart was being torn from his chest. He wanted nothing more than to make her happy every day, or at least reasonably content. When she was upset, he felt helpless.

“I’ve been putting this off for months. I have to get this done, otherwise, they’ll probably get ruined when we move,” she responded in almost a whisper. She was afraid to look at his face as he studied her, knowing full well that if she saw that look of pity on his face she’d fall apart. Noel hated it when people saw her cry, including her husband.

Mark got up off the couch and began moving the stacks of photographs that were sitting next to her, so he could join her on the floor. Once he sat down, he leaned over to hug her and offer some comfort, but her body remained stiff and her eyes focused on the stacks of photographs in front of her. That familiar helpless feeling began to settle in as he racked his brain for the right words to say.

“Noel, why don’t we just put these back in the shoeboxes. I mean, they were good enough the last time you moved, so it should be fine this time. I mean, it’s definitely not worth getting upset over,” he said as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. As soon as the words left his lips he immediately wished he could shove them back in because he knew they were all wrong. 

“Yeah, you’re right,” she said abruptly as she picked up a stack of photographs and tossed it into a shoebox. “I don’t know why I bothered.” She desperately wanted to be the type of woman that had her shit together. She already had the perfect job. She had the semi-perfect husband, though she often wished he could show a little more effort when it came to comforting her. She was finally moving to the perfect house on the west coast, a place she’d dreamed of living her entire life, but she still couldn’t get her life perfectly together. Looking at these photographs, reminded her of the mess she would always be deep down inside because of her less than perfect past. No matter how happy her current life made her, she always felt those bad memories trying to claw their way back into her present mind.

She stood up and made her way to the kitchen to grab a trash bag from under the sink. Startled by her quick departure, Mark clumsily pulled himself up off the ground and followed her.

“Look, I’m sorry. I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. I just hate seeing you get upset, and if looking at those pictures is making you upset, I want you to stop,” he said as she finally looked into his eyes. As soon as their eyes met, she broke down. The tears she had been holding back all afternoon flooded out of her, like a big, snotty tsunami down her face. 

“Oh, Noey. Don’t cry,” he said as he wrapped her into his arms. She buried her face into his shoulder, as she tried her hardest to stop the humiliating breakdown she was having. She rubbed her face on his sweatshirt, wiping away the tears and snot, and she gulped for air, trying to catch her breath. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said when she finally peeled herself away from him, focusing her eyes on the kitchen floor. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m being silly. I’ll probably get my period tomorrow and realize this is all just hormones,” she said as she placed the garbage bag on the counter. 

He took her chin in his hand and lifted her face so he could meet her gaze. “Noey, don’t be sorry. I know what you’ve been through. I don’t judge you. You’re the strongest person I know. Fuck, I don’t get how you can survive all of that and not be a drug-addicted prostitute living on the street. You’re amazing.” 

As soon as the words left his mouth Noel bent over and began laughing. She wrapped her arm around her stomach and grabbed the kitchen counter with her other hand to maintain her balance as she continued her fit of laughter.

“Oh my god,” she said as soon as she caught her breath, tears streaming down her smiling face. “That was so dramatic and honestly a little problematic.” Mark frowned in response. He wasn’t sure why his attempt to comfort her was so humorous and he suddenly had a flashback of his classmates laughing at his scrawny body in the junior high locker room. 

When Noel realized that Mark wasn’t feeling as in on the joke as she was, the smile dropped from her face. She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand before embracing Mark in a firm hug.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry. I swear I wasn’t laughing at you. Although I get why it seemed that way. Everything just hit me as sort of silly, really. I mean, I was being so dramatic looking at those stupid pictures. Like seriously, why couldn’t I just be a grown-up and put them in a photo album without acting like I needed a Barbara Streisand soundtrack as I did it. I can be so weird sometimes. I guess you saying those words to me like I was some brave soldier that survived a war, it just made me realize how stupid I was acting.” 

Mark was still confused by her response. She was minimizing what she had been through. He didn’t understand it, but he did find comfort that she wasn’t entirely laughing at him. There was nothing he hated more than for a woman to laugh at him. He believe all men shared this fear.

“Look, I can understand feeling silly about taking something too seriously. We’ve all been there, but it wasn’t coming from nowhere. I just want to take care of you. I want you to take care of yourself, too. I don’t want things to get bad again,” he said as he pulled Noel back in for another hug while he smelled the top of her head. 

She waited a few seconds, the appropriate amount that wouldn’t hurt his feelings before she pulled out of his embrace and then kissed him on the cheek. She was all smiles again, this time without the laughter. 

“The best way you can take care of me right now, is grabbing a bottle of wine and two glasses, and joining me on the couch to watch another episode of Dateline,” she said, desperate to drop the conversation and return to their usual Saturday evening activity of watching a true crime story and promising each other that they would never, under any circumstance, kill each other.

“Well, then I’m going to have to run to the store because our home is currently dry,” Mark responded, happy to put this behind them and join her in their Saturday evening ritual.

“How the hell did that happen?” Noel asked as she gasped, covering her mouth in feigned horror.

Mark laughed. “I guess it’s official, we’re total winos,” he said as he scooped his keys up off the kitchen counter in his hand.” He kissed her on top of her head and said, “I’ll be quick. Will you make the popcorn and get Dateline ready for my return?”

“Sure thing, but hurry. Keith Morrison waits for no one.”

Noel waited to hear his keys turn in the lock before picking the trash bag back up and making her way back to the piles of photographs sitting on the floor. She wanted to get rid of the scene before Mark returned. She didn’t think about what she was doing. She simply grabbed the stacks of photographs she had sorted from her childhood and threw them inside the garbage bag. The bag was halfway full by the time she was finished. She estimated that there must have been at least a couple of hundred photos in the garbage bag as she made her way down to the hallway of their floor, all the way to the building’s trash chute. She paused for a moment after opening the chute before her instincts kicked in and she tossed the bag down the chute. As she walked back down the hallway to their apartment, she waited for the panic to kick in, for regret to force her to run down to the dumpster to recover the trash bag. Instead, she felt nothing.