A picture's worth a thousand words.

I recently found a photo of a long-ago lover I had lost. 

And then I lost it again.

I remembered being very happy that after a major move in which I thought I may have lost it forever, it had turned up, and then I remember putting it away somewhere for safe keeping.  So safe, in fact, that I couldn't find it again myself.

Which bugged me.

I'm too old to be hiding things from myself, y'know? 

I had a vague recollection of having slipped it into a book, even though I have a candy box full of photos of ex-lovers from other lives, and even a photo album for my best exes, which was given to me by an ex who didn't want to go into the box with the rest of the exes.  I had other pictures of the lost ex in my best ex file, so why hadn't this one — one of my favorites of this ex — gone in with them?

What's maddening when you lose something like this is that you know there are only so many places it could be.  It's hard to hide things from myself these days, because, frankly, I don't have many hiding places left.  I humored myself a little and looked in a couple of drawers, riffled through a stack of papers I'd been meaning to file, even flipped through a couple of books I'd recently had out. 

When I didn't find it I started to suspect something sinister. 

I had obviously hidden it somewhere that when I found it I would get "the joke."  I tried to think what the joke could be.  Could it be tucked away in The Male Nude?  Am I that obvious?  Maybe in my dog-eared copy of Le Nain Rouge?  Too obscure.  I thumbed through a few more volumes.  Nada.  I ruled out any volume of poetry on my shelf, because, frankly, as hot as he was, it was not a romantic attachment. 

But if it wasn't, why had I spent half the day angry and agitated over it? 

Well, first of all, there was something about the picture itself, which I took, and which I've managed to hold onto for these many years.  It was back before digital cameras were affordable, and while I've scanned it, that picture with all its creases and smudge marks, notes scratched on the back — as a personal artifact it's irreplaceable.

Isn't it funny how we get attached to things?  And I am a manic thrower-awayer and tosser-outer.  Because getting attached to too many things only reminds me that much more of my mortality.  On the other hand, what's left is the past I've meticulously constructed out of fragments of truth.  I was there.  It was real.  A moment in amber.  The photograph is a kind of proof.  The kind that in the hands of a skilled defense lawyer could corroborate me, but a clever prosecutor could probably turn it against me.

That's how it is with ex-lovers after all. 

In the end I found the photo as I had found its subject: by accident (although not on the street).  Tucked into a little volume of poetry — The Oxford Book of Sonnets, of all places, sandwiched between two of my favorites by Edna Saint Vincent Millay... 

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own. 
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you–think not but I would!–
And seek another as I sought you first. 
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true. 

...and...

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day, 
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow. 
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are, 
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Ah, yes, now I remember the joke.  Nothing like a little Edna Saint Vincent Millay to jog the memory, is there?