Tota Vita Mea

I am looking, looking at a photograph. I am looking at a small, insignificant photograph in my hand losing my mind. I cannot begin to comprehend what I see before more. I am losing grip of all my understanding. How can a photograph have such a hold on me? On my heart and my mind, my emotions and my memories? I know that the photo is not of something within my own human experience. It is separated from me. Foreign, entirely. Yet, in some way, I feel as though I have seen this photo a thousand times in a thousand lifetimes. In some way, this photograph is the link between my present self and a spiraling table of my former selves, spinning heavenward into nothingness. For what reason, in what conceivable way, could a trivial, simple photo bring to me such a damning sense of incompleteness and infinity? Nostalgic loss and existential promise?

I am looking at a photograph and seeing my whole life. My birth into this earth and my death far beyond it. The dream that came to me as an infant. The thoughts that spawn from my mind in this present. The dying breaths that flow past my lips as the earth crumbles around me. I look at this photograph. For hours, for centuries. My whole life has been spent looking at this photograph, for within it lies every experience I have ever encountered and every decision I have ever made. I do not know why this photograph was given to me and from where it originated, much like how I cannot explain why my own life was given to me or where I originated. Within my shaking hands, this photograph appeared, and now between my fingers it holds the weight of my entirety inside its four corners. A stupid, all-encompassing picture.

The sweet, careful color. The hazy, heavenly light. The soft smell of the paper and the rough texture of dust, or something far older, resting atop my fingers. Do not distract me, anyone who arrives at my side. I am looking at this photograph and I cannot stop. Would you tell a man to stop breathing? Would you tell this man to tear his eyes away from his own existence? I continue to look at the photograph.

A lonely December night, watching the sun sink below distant hills as I sit beside a lazy Arizona riverbed. A sharp breath of air at the peak of a Colorado mountain range. A marriage proposal as the one knee sinks deeper into the sand and ocean waves. An injury from an abusive childhood game that never fully heals. The photograph shows all. It is all. I look within the crevices and the deepest reaches of the photograph, and there lies nothing hidden from me. I see all because the photograph allows me to see all. I am the contents of what I see and what I am shown is my entirety and my fullness.

A lifetime has passed, and a thousand thousands have followed and never have I turned away from this photograph. Or so it has felt. Cities have turned to dust but I remain. Suns have formed and collapsed, but I remain. I am a key component of the universe, thanks only to the photograph that I continue looking into. For an eternity I will look, because it is all that matters to me now. Maybe it is the only thing.

Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe it has been fifteen minutes, and now I may put the photo away. Maybe that is the end of it.