It was on a shelf for eleven years.
I knew what was in it. I had put it there knowing what was in it, which was the years I was not entirely sure I wanted to look at yet, the years I was still processing, still metabolizing, still not at the distance I needed to look at them clearly rather than from inside the feeling, which is a different kind of looking and not always the right kind. I left it on the shelf. I walked past it. I dusted around it, which is its own kind of strange, cleaning the shelf that holds the years you are not ready to open.
I opened it last month.
I did not plan to. I was looking for something else entirely and the album was between the something else and where I was standing and I took it down and sat on the floor with my back against the bookshelf the way you sit when you are doing something that requires you to be on the floor, close to the ground, grounded, because the ground is steadying for things that might not be steady.
The children were so small.
That was the first thing, the simplest and most unbearable thing, the faces of the small versions of people who are now fully themselves, the evidence of their smallness in a form I had let myself almost forget because living with children means you live in the current version and stop being able to see the accumulation of all the previous versions simultaneously. The album gave me all the versions at once. I was not prepared for all the versions at once.
And there I was in the photographs.
Younger, tired, in the middle of things, not performing anything in most of them because who performs for a photograph in a kitchen in 2009. Just there, just a woman in the middle of the life, and I looked at her with the tenderness I have been practising for the present-me and extended it backward, all the way back, to the woman in the album who did not know what was coming and was doing the thing anyway, who was, in her own approximate and imperfect way, enough.
She was enough. I put the album back on the shelf.
I know where it is now. I will take it down again.
