One Autumn in a Courtyard

Strangely enough, memory almost never gives you back the details of a day that once felt unforgettable.

It discards the specifics without a second thought. What the courtyard looked like, how the light fell that day — all of it fades quietly, as if that were the plan all along.

And yet memory clings, with baffling persistence, to the most useless things: random melodies, fragments of someone else’s conversations, the faces of people you’ll never see again, and other information nobody asked it to keep.

Maybe that’s why photography is one of the most practical inventions of all time. It doesn’t try to remember anything. It simply doesn’t forget.

Southern Urals, Russia.
October, 2023.
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