better learn how to kneel

There was a girl who purchased a box of slides at a garage sale.  She wanted the box, not the slides, but the sale included both and so she took them.  And then found a surprising joy in looking at the slides:  other people's surprise birthday parties, ladies in old fashioned swimsuits and bathing caps.  Someone laughing by the mailbox.  A puppy.  Children playing on the lawn.  She projected them on her bedroom wall and stared at them while she lay recovering from her nausea.

Sometimes other people's special memories can be special to anyone.  It's the same thing as the old postcards in Banff.  The pictures are lovely but it's the messages I like the most.  I always look for the ones signed, Love.

That girl who spent the afternoon with someone else's memories, I have spent some time looking for her and it turns out I can't find her.  I am concerned, of course, that she has died.  She was in palliative care with spinal cancer. 

But disappearance takes an effort on the part of someone who is alive.  Dead people don't pick up and hide all evidence of their existence before they go.  So the fact she has vanished so completely might be a good sign.  I hope so.

I want to hear her voice again.  I want to see her slides.

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