A Short Visit in Mystery Film

It was a shock to see her face after all of these years. But it was there, plain as day as I flipped through the photo’s. You’ve got to love mystery film. I have a whole drawer of it, and this year decided to start getting it developed. The drawer contains all different kinds of film and disposable cameras imaginable. So I went to pick up three rolls of MF that I had dropped off, and sitting in my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot I saw her for the first time in almost fifteen years. Her eyes looked up at me from the photo, I immediately stopped breathing. It was almost as though she was suddenly there. It was unimaginable the feeling that came over me. First the shock of seeing a picture of her, then the feeling that she was in my car made my skin feel like goose flesh in an instant. Then I became curious. How did this film end up in my possession? Why was this film developed now, fifteen years after she died? I was overcome with grief from missing her. I believed I had passed the point of crying over the loss of my grandmother so many years ago. It actually made me laugh. So, here I was flipping through photos in my car, and I was laughing and crying over them. I must have looked like a lunatic. It just made me remember how much I missed her. If ever I needed someone’s advice in life, it would have been her that I have chosen to ask. I would give anything to sit at her little green table, watching her gracefully smoke her cigarette, and sip her coffee.
I sat there in my truck for some time, looking at her photo, a photo that no one has ever seen. My grandmother smiled at me with bright eyes and flaming red hair from the photograph that I held in my shaking hands. I am guessing that from her healthy glow, this film had to have been close to twenty years old. As I flipped further through the pictures I found that I was correct. There I was, probably ten or eleven years old, dancing in circles in the parlor of my Grandmothers house dressed in her long white dress. I don’t remember doing that. How odd, and what a gift it was to see her today. My spirits are uplifted, as I am reminded of all of her words of wisdom she would give me in my youth. Among them is one of my favorites. “Live your life, don’t worry about pissing people off.” She had so many different quotes, I will never remember all of them, but I still remember most, and that is what is important.