Once upon a time, I found a picture.

**Not this actual picture.

Once upon a time, I found a picture....

An orphan picture abandoned by all the other pictures between the pages of a really old book, yet all books, when they are old and still readable, are still on their prime.

This picture had a curly haired baby girl with that forced smile caused by an older person making the kid smile so the picture wouldn’t go to waste. The picture was brown, that specific brown color old and beautiful stories are painted with.

I felt nostalgic. Nostalgic because I was absolutely sure that this little girl had already died, because the sepia whispered it to me.

The book belonged to a friend of my sister who wanted to get rid of her books, this one clearly bought on a second hand book shop.

I started wondering how this girl's life had been. Had she found love? Where did she live? Who took her hand just before her photo had been taken? Who took it after her first kiss?

I was obsessed with the ephemeral nature of life. How many times had the minute hand's big sister revisited the same ol' place since the toc yelled by the seconder hand when the picture had been taken?

This picture traveled far away just to reach me, and I wouldn’t be dumb enough to set it aside and continue reading.

I started questioning the origin of the picture. How did it end up on a book?

Maybe her mother read the book and had her little girl as her bookmark and forgot it when she gave the book away. Maybe one day she looked for the picture out of nostalgia just to have her efforts of finding it gone to waste.

Maybe a boy saw a girl, whom he fell in love with instantly, enter a train, dropping accidentally an old picture of herself as a little girl. The gorgeous girl, never to be seen again, had captured his mind and soul, but most dangerously, his heart. He promised himself to find her someday and give her the picture back in exchange for letting him give her his love in any way his insufficient heart could. Sadly he never found her and died with her as his last thought, fact no one ever knew since it was his beautiful secret, and left the picture on the last book out of many books he read thinking of her.

Maybe this was the only picture she had coming from a poor family, even though many years had passed ever since she took it, but one day she found a boy she could call true love who ended up showing her how you can actually hear your heart break. As tears fell off her face, she left him, leaving him only her baby picture, with a piece of paper saying "I think you should have it."

Maybe a kid wanted to grow up an artist which he did on his own without the support of his family, and one day working as a janitor for a wealthy family which had a girl whom he fell in love with. She shared the feelings but could never be with him so she gave him her camera with which he lived and breathed. He took pictures for her all the time, but one day he died of a strange disease. His mother regretting the anger towards her son's dream after his death found the pictures he devoted to his impossible love, and decided to bestow them upon her as a search for her son's pardon. In the middle of the rain the humble mother arrived at the doorstep of a big house, dripping wet, gave the girl an envelope, declined the invitation to go inside the house and left and disappeared into the blurry night. Inside, the wealthy girl opened the envelope to found all the photographs ruined. All of them an amorphous mass of faces and landscapes, all except one, a photograph of an unknown curly headed baby girl.

I ended up giving the picture back to a friend. She had a better a chance of returning the picture. A better chance of giving this picture back to the life it owned it. I thought about it a lot but ended up giving it back. When you want to give life to a memory, physical ideas serve no purpose. You have to use your heart to hold it. But ultimately, one idea made me give the picture back. The thought of a baby girl meeting her great great grandmother the way I did. Ultimately I’m writing about someone’s ancestor, but they will never know.

Which book did found it on does not matter and I don’t even remember. The idea is this girl lived and died, and many years after the last thought about her faded away I remembered her. I imagined her. I loved her in a weird nonsensical way only I could understand. Maybe in another life, in another time, in another place, I can hug her, kiss her gently on the cheek, and whisper softly into her right ear...

"Thank you..."