instamatic

You should find something better to do with your time,_ Mandy told him. __ spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up.___Come again?_ Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. __ take photographs and develop them myself, I__e got my own darkroom_ it was a joke,_ Mandy laughed. __ love photography and I__ gonna be a photojournalist someday.___eally?_ Alecto asked. For the first time since she__ met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. __I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well_ but I can__ be a photojournalist like you_ I can__ be anything_ still, at least I can take photographs, it__ fun.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not __e might have to eat the dog_ poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor_ poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They__ saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera_ I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then_ this mall doesn__ even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it__ depressing_

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.