It's Under the Bed - Mark Maynard

It’s under the bed. A large, clear plastic tub with a green lid. It is full of loose photographs from my life, from childhood up until my wedding. This is my young life. This is my single life.

These photos cannot be albumized. Memory cannot be categorized by people or events. The mention of certain phrases or the first few notes of an old song can trigger in my mind a crystal clear photograph of a person or a moment spent.

So these snapshots sit blended together in their airless memory bank, and occasionally, when I rummage under the bed for a flashlight or a last minute greeting card from my wife’s matching plastic bin that shoulders against mine for space in the darkness, a new photo will jostle its way to the top so that when I reopen the box, and old friend has clamored to the front of memory.

There is a picture of a much younger me with a pretty, curly haired girl in a headband, both of us standing together on a sled run. It used to remind me of the times she and I, neighbors growing up, used to spend together – we’d walk for miles in our neighborhood, travel with each other’s families, once I even tried to teach her to drive a manual transmission. She and I were always close and now, when we talk infrequently, what would have been small talk between neighbors becomes revelatory, the small stories in our lives magnified by time and distance.

There is another photo of me, dancing with my aunt at my wedding. We are both having great fun. This picture shows little about the moment and everything about our relationship. Neither she nor I are much for dancing, yet it was a chance for us to share a moment together during a very special time in my life. The picture does not reveal the cancer slowly growing in her body, a blast of unchecked cell growth that would metastasize in her brain so that her eyes would eventually lose muscle control and cruelly cross as I sat across from her at her small home in Hawaii years later and made small talk, not knowing how to properly say goodbye to someone for the last time.