B-side

We can't see the wind, we only see its consequences. We see what the wind does, bending branches, falling leaves, a wave in the water, blown hair. A photograph is similarly invisible, it's not it that we see, we don't see the photograph, we see the picture exposed to the paper. The actual photograph, the paper object, the thing that it is, we barely consider. We don't perceive how effortlessly the photograph keeps hold of the thing we see. A mother, like wind and a photograph, can be unseen by her children, they may not see her or know her as well as they think they do. A mother who also held them although never so effortlessly as a photograph does. A mother shows her child to the world, gives her child to the world, but the world doesn't always see her. We may see her in motion, see the effect she had on her children, see the world she builds around herself, the world building itself around her and yet still not see her. Even the child here, visible in the snapshot, becomes like wind, vanishing and becoming the woman we don't see, the mother we don't see. I look at this photograph, not seeing the photograph and I see my mother, standing ankle deep in water. I don't see the wind, I see the waves in the water, I see her hair twisted and curling against the blank sky, and just like I don't see the wind, and I don't see the photograph, I don't see her. I think I do, but I don't. What I see is a split second of captured time. I can't know this child anymore than anyone else would looking at the photograph. I know this child was my mother, but who she was is as invisible as the photograph and as invisible as wind. All I know, all that's left of her, other than these frozen images is what I remember of the woman she became, her effect on me, the consequences, what I think about when I think of her, how I feel now, remembering her, how bent, or falling, or breaking or receding, how twisted or curling I am in the wake of her force and invisibility.