smiles

well as i recall they asked me why i take pictures. so i asked them why they wear a mask. it was one of those movie-scene-kind-of nights, with the sun falling asleep behind the waves of an orange horizon. in the silence that followed i upped my aperture and dusted off my lens, seeing in my periphery these moving silhouettes as they danced barefoot above the shores of that beautiful beach. why i take pictures? i was inclined to tell them to smile, but instead i gave them a peace of my mind: “because it's just a flash, all this, and one day you'll be gone, forgotten, swallowed into history like a line in a book, a name on a stone, a face in a frame." their masks began to come off now, revealing their eyes as bleak smiles invaded their faces through the tunnel of my viewfinder. i saw dreams deferred in their eyes, a melancholy that glistened across their features with the coming of twilight, and after the snap of my shutter immortalized that moment, i saw on their faces the heavy realization that one day this is all going to end. “life buries all of us,” i said, surely quoting someone i have never read, “but not these pictures. not our books. not the stories we tell our children. they will outlive us for a thousand years." i took a good look at that picture, hearing my own thoughts rise and fall with the tides. all those faces we will never know, all those hands we will never hold, all those beating hearts of billions living out their lives on this lonely star. "so give them something to look at,” i said. “when they stop in those moments of longing to look back at your face on a high shelf, what will they learn about how you spent your days?” another wave splashed against their heels, receding as quickly as it came, pulling their eyes down and away to the sea. when they turned back around, their masks were gone, sinking rapidly into the raging surf. they seemed more alive now, happy, more like the people they used to be. and i remember one of them asking me, just as i was leaving, if i wouldn't mind taking another picture. i obliged, of course, and this time they were all smiles

(THE DIARY OF EDDY MOOD)

—jk montane