Photo From the Future by Caterina Alvarez

I fetched a photo of myself from the future and projected it like a hologram onto everything I’ve done and will ever do. The sun rose on my image and I grew even brighter.

Manuscripts, shopping lists, entreaties, and indictments are now accompanied by who I’ll be just before I die to illustrate what they made of me, rather than of what I made. 

Coarse white and silver hair question marks my softly sagging cheek. Brown eyes, sorrow-filled and small, blaze out from under purply cross-hatched lids illuminating my yellow-rose tinted cheeks. Betwixt lays a smile, wretched and askew but hopeful and knowing.

I splashed the photo all over social media emblazoned with gratitude hand emojis and quotes from the geniuses I’ve learned from like Baldwin, Proust, Hurston, Lawrence. Caetano Veloso, Chucho Valdez, Abby Lincoln and Abraham too. My husband, son, and daughter. My parents, friends, and foes. The oceans, lakes, ponds, and puddles. The gravel, dirt, grass, poison, and foam. 

I made of myself a meme, an ermahgerd, an Elephant Woman, a memo wrought by all run through, around, and about me.

Weathered, reasoned, beaten down, lifted up, beatified, pickled, preyed upon, soiled and purified.

My too-salty stir-fry, rock-hard flan, zabaglione served cold, every roll of toilet paper bought, used and replaced, the beds, conversations and reservations I’ve made, mussed and missed, the clothes I’ve folded and frayed, boo-boos I’ve kissed, I slapped one on each before the image disintegrated, like a Snapchat, like a spark from a fire contained by twelve rocks.

With a print copy of old me from the drugstore, I dotted my features and shadows with Krazy Glue and dusted it heavily with my mother and grandmother’s ashes. I photographed it again and blew it up large as a mural. In the dark of four in the morning, autumn, with ladders, buckets and brushes, I Mod Podged it onto the building I lived in on 6th and C in the East Village of the 90’s, where I never felt unsafe in short shorts on solitary walks at four am. 

Because people are people, all better and worse, in canon. 

I graffitied giant old ashen me with Con gracia pa ti in rainbow colors.

The small ashed version, I flew it to Guatemala and found the relatives I’d never met, my maternal line whose presence shaped my longing, filtered my light, fingered the thin shoulder of my dancing form. This is who I’m becoming, I said proudly, like a child. Then I stomped my feet, shook those ashes their way, and asked, who, dear family, are we?

For the multitudes I’d hurt unknowingly and knowingly, either like insects on my windshield or when I’d projected the seemingly insurmountable behemoths of my psyche onto others and strove to hurt them in defense of my weak, enraged self, their souls too bore this new old likeness of me for all to see. I was accountable. Little old me who hurt as much as she helped, spun off into future’s pasts was lucky enough, at times, to be forgiven, and much later on, to be remembered, for and as, both better and worse.

Ms. Alvarez is currently writing a novel. She is an editor for Thirty West Publishing House and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her story “Short Division” made the Wigleaf Top 50 for 2023. Originally from Los Angeles, she resides in Denver, CO. Find her and her other publications on X @Caterina445.

24 January 2024