The Infinite Hotel of the Dead

“You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone.”

That was what the woman in the red raincoat said

before stepping out of the photograph.

She left a wet footprint on the oily pavement

and vanished into another Thursday.

*

I found the image years later in a shoebox

beneath my mother's winter dresses,

wedged between a dead moth

and a receipt for oranges from 1998.

Everyone in the picture was smiling

with the exhausted concentration of the mortal.

The sky had that strange color that old timelines develop

when they begin to collapse inward.

Somewhere nearby, a dog barked in three different eras at once.

*

I remember touching the corner of the photograph

and feeling heat,

like the sun inside the image

was still burning somewhere.

That frightened me more than any ghost ever could.

Ghosts at least admit the body tried and died.

But timelines keep making copies,

forever and ever, amen.

*

In one version of the world

my brother never gets sick.

In another, the highway floods before the accident.

In another, you stay.

In yet another, I become unbearable and holy,

living alone in a motel beside the desert,

writing sermons on napkins for strangers.

*

Every possibility keeps breathing somewhere,

dragging its oxygen tank through eternity.

But consciousness travels poorly between them.

Memory leaks in transit.

*

This is why certain afternoons hurt for no reason.

Why some songs arrive already grieving,

and why you sometimes stand in the grocery store produce aisle

with tears in your eyes

because peaches exist under fluorescent lights

for such a brief and ridiculous amount of time.

*

Mortality is compression.

The universe, taking infinite versions of you

and forcing them through the eye of the needle

called Now.

*

You are temporary here,

Photographable.

And even then, barely.

*

This is why old pictures feel haunted.

How the camera catches people

mid-disappearance.

Every snapshot is evidence

that someone survived exactly long enough

to become impossible to recover.

Even the living are difficult to retrieve.

*

Look closely at a family album

and you’ll notice everyone is already leaving.

The child becomes the widow,

While the lover becomes the stranger.

And the body turns into passing weather,

a little more each day.

*

A photograph is a certificate of loss.

The woman in the red raincoat understood this.

That’s why she laughed

when the shutter clicked.

That’s why she stepped sideways into another life

while the image was still developing.

I envy her sometimes.

I imagine her wandering through adjacent worlds

as if they are hallways in an infinite hotel,

touching the wallpaper of abandoned futures.

*

Perhaps she found a timeline

where nobody dies bewildered.

Perhaps she found the one

where the garden survives the storm.

Perhaps there exists a version of this very moment

where you and I are ancient already,

sitting beside a dark window,

speaking softly about all the people we once were.

*

Or perhaps every timeline ends identically.

A room that empties itself of names,

A body learning the final grammar of silence,

and somewhere, in another layer of reality,

someone reaching for a camera

just one second too late.