Photographs. Dreams. Memories. Faces of the long forgotten. The friends. The enemies. Sitting in bed sifting through pictures is like watching a movie of my own life. Then I find it. The face that at one time smiled when I walked by. 

The eyes that I looked for in endless seas of people. 

The hands that I would squeeze when I was scared. 

All caressed in a single photograph. 

My stomach squeezes, and shivers run up and down my body, leaving it a shaking mess. The tears come, blurring the vision and dropping onto the snapshot of memory, the shard of broken dreams. As my tears drop onto it, the ink blurs and no longer is there a face. No hands. All the integrity of the image is gone and all that is left is a rainbow of colors like the watercolors I mixed when I was five. I can feel my hands doing it before my blurry eyes and mind register it. 

There goes the walls of protection that I had been sheltered with my whole life. The shell of a million different experiences explodes into glittering fragments of life as it was before. I think back to all the mistakes. All the lies. All the things that I should have done to be better. The sounds come to me now. The laughing, the screaming, the crying, the greetings and goodbyes. Then the image is suddenly split in two, and all that is left is me. Broken. 

The feathering shards of paper are staring at me. I lay down in bed and look out at the stars and think about how life is never going to be the same now. I hope that when I wake up it will be gone, but it’s all still there. The memories, still strewn across the floor. My face, wet and sticky from late night tears. All the photographs are still there.

Except one.