bliumchik | Black and white is forever

I hold in my hands a photograph, I hold in my hands a memory. It is not my memory, it belongs to my mother - the seventeen year old girl in the white turtleneck, her hands clenched by her sides and face pointed in anxious bewilderment. She is at a wedding. The fat registry woman is wearing a dress that seems to be made out of a quilt of felt squares. The smell of an old photograph is unique and strange. It tastes of the Soviet Union (metaphorically, i've never licked a photograph). Right down to the crack in the wall below the hammer and sickle crest, and the leaves of some forlorn potted plant behind the lady in the bonnet. Look at the bride, signing her name with a white pen, although her dress is not - and would be more suited to a dinner party than her wedding, but this isn't a traditional wedding. Her parents don't know about it. My mother got a call at seven in the evening from an old friend she hadn't spoken to for a few years - "I'm getting married. Come be a witness." The bride is beautiful. Her glossy hair tied in a bun, one strand wisping gracefully over her cheek. My mother's hair is short and messy. It looks, in fact, just like mine does now. And I think I recognise the necklace she's wearing. Isn't it fascinating? Someone elses memories, all intertwined with yours in a piece of black and white past with a tear at the edge. A picture with a story, a story with a million pictures, right down to the ashtray sitting next to the registry book on the shiny desktop, that mirrors the brides arm and the passports and the other witness, a boy in a black suit with ears at ninety degrees to his head, and the groom in his white suit and his expression of... joy? Love? How many words does it take to be worth a picture? His face says "Wow". And whether or not they divorced four years later, and she wentoff to uni in Moscow, leaving their child to be raised mostly by grandmothers, this picture is a snapshot of the moment, in which the stories are momentarily still, and a period inks onto somebody's life.