Kind Like Katey

I’ve been looking through a lot of old photos lately.

Every time I write a story for this blog, I go digging. Through my phone. Facebook. Old albums. Screenshots. Anywhere I might find a picture that goes with the memory I’m trying to tell.

And somewhere in all that looking, I realized something that absolutely broke my heart.

These are it.

These are the last pictures I will ever have with my dad.

These are the last pictures I will ever have with Katey.

There will never be another one.

I will never stand beside my dad again and say, “Smile.”

I’ll never take another selfie with my sister.

There won’t be another Christmas picture. Another birthday. Another vacation. Another random picture somebody takes when none of us are paying attention.

The collection is complete.

God, I hate that.

When those pictures were taken, I didn’t know they were part of a collection that would eventually stop. They were just pictures.

Some of them I probably didn’t even like at the time. Maybe my hair looked like shit. Maybe I hated the way I looked. Maybe someone had their eyes closed. Maybe the lighting sucked.

All the stupid things we care about when we think there will always be another picture.

Now I look at them completely differently.

I zoom in on their faces.

I look at what Dad was wearing. I look at Katey’s smile. I look at what was sitting on the table behind us. I try to remember where we were, what we were talking about, what happened right before someone took the picture.

Sometimes I can remember.

Sometimes I can’t.

And that hurts too.

I especially wish I could get my hands on Katey’s pictures.

She had her own photos. Her own view of our family and our lives. Pictures she took that I probably never saw. Pictures of us that I don’t have. Pictures of Dad. Pictures of the kids. Pictures of ordinary days that nobody thought would ever become important.

But when we lost Katey, somehow we lost those too.

They just disappeared with her.

I think about that more than I probably should.

What was on her phone? What pictures did she love enough to save? Did she have pictures of me that I’ve never seen? Did she have some ridiculous picture that would make me laugh my ass off today?

I’ll probably never know.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve become so obsessed with telling these stories.

I don’t want anything else to disappear.

I want to write down the ridiculous things. The hard things. The things that made us laugh until we couldn’t breathe. The things that pissed us off. The things that seemed completely insignificant when they happened.

Because I’m learning that the ordinary stuff doesn’t stay ordinary forever.

One day it becomes the stuff you would give anything to have back.

So now I save the blurry pictures.

The bad angles.

The ones where somebody isn’t looking at the camera.

The ones I would have deleted years ago because I didn’t like the way I looked.

I don’t care anymore.

Because I know something now that I didn’t know when those pictures were taken.

Sometimes a photograph becomes priceless not because it’s a good picture, but because one day you realize there will never be another one.

And I would give anything for just one more.