When we were younger, my brother and I, somewhere between dream and memory, would spend our weekends with a neighborhood friend. We would walk through the walls of his grandfather's home and we would smile and run our hands along the powdered beams.
One day we spotted a wooden box that had been placed on the inside of the house just behind a loose panel at the back of a bedroom closet. It resembled a large humidor and was wrapped in twine. An old shipping label had been glued to the top and had started to peel. Written in faded red were the words:
For Esmé
And when we opened the box, it smelled of dried petals and spices and we saw that beneath torn muslin were eight-millimeter film spools labeled by date and emotion. We quickly grabbed the rings of film and with little regard, stretched out the frames and stared at them into the light. There were repeated images of smiling faces and landscapes and the outline of a girl that made an appearance in every spool.
And tucked neatly between two spools of film, there was also a piece of lined paper that had a single sentence written out in small script:
“Every person and every moment is absolutely unique and they continue to live if captured in light.”