Looking Through Myself
On an unnaturally white carpet, in front of a burning fireplace and an equally bright Christmas tree, sit two small, smiling boys. They wear matching outfits, the distinguishing mark of young siblings everywhere: overalls, white shirts, vinyl shoes. The younger one is not yet a year old; his bare head and lone two front teeth are proof of this. He is my brother, likely unaware of that salient detail at that moment. I, older, at two and a half, am seated on a short log behind him. It is 2000.
When I was three my father came home from work one day with an enormous canvas, twice as big as me, featuring the photo. This canvas hung in our living room on a wall facing the front door, so any visitors to our home would be unexpectedly greeted by our smiles. I would spend hours staring at it. Later, I tried pressing my face against the canvas to see whose face was larger. My face on the canvas was bigger than mine in real life. Eventually, by the time I was five, I had grown larger — the real ‘I’, of course. Afterwards I always wondered: When exactly did I outgrow the Robert in the picture?
Over time, I grew so attached to staring at the picture that I began imagining myself inside it, interacting with my brother right before and after it was taken. The eyes that gazed out at me were smiling, playful, because he’d probably played with his brother in the car ride over to the photo studio. Even though his brother probably couldn’t talk, and he himself only knew a couple of dozen words, they could still communicate with each other. He was probably acting as the older sibling, holding onto his brother’s hand as he took his first, wobbling steps. Brotherhood, not childhood — maybe that’s really what this was all about.
My train of thoughts would stop for whatever reason and I’d be back where I was, in time again, sitting on the floor or the couch and not on top of a log.
When I think about it now, I think of the absurdity of it all — the vague narcissism that visitors must have imagined as they beheld our giant faces plastered on our walls. (Yet we were children — and children can get away with anything.) There is something darkly funny about the idea of a large photograph taking up almost an entire corner of a room. It evokes images of some European palace, with the owners’ faces everywhere one looks, on friezes and ceilings. Once I asked my mother how she and my father could even consider hanging such a ridiculous photo of us on the wall. She said simply, “Your father was so proud of that picture!”
Over time, the photo faded. Light and dust and my young fingers chipped away at the canvas, forcing flecks of it to fall off and disappear. When we moved to a new home nine years ago, the photo came off the wall and ended up in our garage. Our smiles now silently stare out from a dark corner. Yet the memory never left, because it is still everywhere; just not on our living room wall.
Each December, as part of our family’s Christmas decorating ritual, the photo ends up on a side table, surrounded by other, more recent photographs of our family. A smaller version hangs on a shelf in my grandmother’s apartment. My mother keeps a framed copy on her desk in her first-grade classroom. While looking through my closet this past winter, I was startled — yet unsurprised — to find a medium-sized copy in a frame, which now hangs on my bedroom wall. None of these even comes close to the canvas.
When I would think about my childhood, this image was always at the forefront of my mind. I’d seen other photos of my younger self, of course. But somehow, whenever I’d think of myself before age 10, I’d always think of two-and-a-half-year-old me, sitting on a log. It’s remained a reassuring constant throughout the past few years, especially as I forget so many of my childhood memories, leaving behind only fragments. I still remember the taste of the coffee cake my elementary school served; I still remember the thrill of being tall enough to ride the “Batman” roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain; I still remember the prickly grass of the lawn outside my childhood home, and the plumerias which would fall and change color at all times of the year. Yet I cannot hold on to everything.
Maybe that’s why I value this picture so much. Sure, there are many other photos that I’ve discovered many in recent years, shedding light on forgotten birthday parties, family trips, and park playdates, all taken before cell phones could permanently document the world around you. Sometimes, you need something that’s larger than life itself, something that you can grab hold of and know it’s yours and not forget.
Something as big as that canvas, perhaps.
— Robert Miranda ’20, a Crimson Editorial Chair, is an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House.