#distant hours

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

Hope’s one thing, expectation’s quite another.

There's only one photograph from my mum and dad's wedding. I mean, presumably there are more, gathering dust somewhere in a forgotten white album, but there's only one image I know of that's survived the passage of years. It's just the two of them in it, not one of those typical wedding photos where the bride and groom's families fan out in either direction providing wings to the couple in the center, unbalanced wings so you suspect the creature would never be able to fly. In this photo their mismatched families have melted away and it's just the two of them, and the way she's staring at his face it's like she's enraptured. As if he glows, which he sort of does: an effect of the old lights photographers used back then, I suppose. And he's so impossibly young, they both are; he still has hair, right across the top of his head, and no idea that it's not going to stick around. No idea that he will have a son, then lose him; that his future daughter will so bewilder him and that his wife will come to ignore him, that one day his heart will seize up and he'll be taken to the hospital in an ambulance and that same wife will sit in the waiting room with the daughter he can't understand, waiting for him to wake up. None of that is present in the photo, not even a hint. That photo is a frozen moment; their whole future lies unknown and ahead, just as it should. But at the same time, the future is in that photo, a version of it at any rate. It's in their eyes, hers especially. For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he's captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins its crash towards the ground. And the young woman, my mum, is seeing more than just the young man standing beside her, the fellow she's in love with, she's seeing their whole life together, stretching out ahead... Then again, perhaps I'm romanticizing; perhaps she's just admiring his hair, or looking forward to the reception, or the honeymoon...You create your own fiction around photos like that, images that become iconic within a family.

For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.