GOING DEEP

This is me with my parents and sisters, deep in the Cotswolds. 1970, maybe slightly later, is my best guess. My youngest sister died suddenly, more than a dozen years ago. The other doesn’t talk to us much, and when she does, tells terrible stories. My mother will have been dead two years at the end of April. Dad, from his west-end assisted-living studio, bemoans the bed he’s made for himself and doesn’t always realize she’s gone. I never wore sandals again is just one thing I realise looking at this image, and I still dissociate once or twice a year, sometimes for a week or more, something to do with whatever would happen before or after the shutter slashed past, quick as a falcon, sharp as a blade.

* I found a photocopy of the original photo among my dad’s things when I was packing up his house. He’d stretched the image somehow, as if he’d tried to rip the snapshot from the glass mid-scan, and we all looked about six inches taller. I imagined writing a piece titled Stretching The Truth, something like that. But first I asked AI to fix that elongation, and it added the empty street behind us. A friend suggested it looks now like a film set, a dream state, and that fits really well how much of my growing up feels from this distance surreal, untrustworthy.