Chapter 04 · 3 min 19 sec
The Photograph They Chose to Frame
The weight of words never spoken — how silence can be its own kind of violence.
Lyrics· 248 words
[Verse 1] Out of forty frames from that one Sunday This is the one that made it to the wall The light was good, my chin was at an angle That made the rest of the afternoon disappear You can't see that I'd been crying twenty minutes earlier You can't see the argument still drying on my face All you see is a girl laughing in a doorway Which, to be fair, did also happen
[Verse 2] The other thirty-nine are in a box somewhere I couldn't tell you which closet, which year One of them shows exactly what was happening The one nobody picked to frame That's the curator's job, my mother told me once Deciding what the story's going to be I think I learned that lesson faster than the others I think I've been doing her job for her since
[Bridge] Look how easy it is to believe a single frame When there's no one in the room to say otherwise I'm not lying when I hang it on the wall I'm just choosing which Sunday gets to live
[Verse 3] Now when people ask me how I'm doing I hand them this exact photograph Chin at the angle, light still good Thirty-nine truths still in a box somewhere Maybe someday I'll take it down and show you The whole roll, the bad light, the real face But today the frame stays exactly where it's hanging And that's the only Sunday you get to know
Short Story
*A story for curious minds*
There once was a cartographer named Imelda who had sailed the same coastline forty times in her life, charting it from forty slightly different angles, in forty different lights. At the end of her career, the town asked her to submit one final map to hang in the harbor hall — the official, definitive map of the coast, the one sailors would trust forever after.
She had forty drafts to choose from. Some showed the coast at its cruelest, jagged and grey, the rocks that had taken three ships that she knew of. Some showed it gentle, gold at sunset, forgiving. One, drawn on a particularly difficult morning, showed almost nothing — just fog, because that was all she'd been able to see.
She chose the gold one. It was, undeniably, beautiful. It was also, undeniably, true — the coast really had looked like that, once, for about twenty minutes, on a Tuesday in her thirty-first year.
The map went up in the harbor hall and sailors trusted it completely, the way people trust anything that's been framed and hung at eye level with good lighting. New captains studied it before their first voyages. Mothers pointed to it and told their children, "That's our coast." No one asked to see the other thirty-nine drafts, rolled and forgotten in a chest in Imelda's attic, one of which showed, with brutal accuracy, exactly where the rocks were that had taken those three ships.
Imelda thought about the chest often in her last years. She never burned the other drafts. She never hung them either. Instead, she made a habit, every few months, of climbing to the attic alone and unrolling one at random, just to remind herself the gold one wasn't the only true thing she'd ever drawn — just the one she'd decided the harbor hall could hold.
On the morning she died, her grandniece found her in the attic, the fog draft spread across her lap, looking at it the way you look at an old photograph of yourself you don't quite recognize and can't quite look away from either.
The grandniece kept the gold map exactly where it hung. But she took the fog draft down to the framer in town, and hung it in her own small house, where no sailors would ever see it, where it could just be true without having to also be useful to anyone.
More From This Album
