I enjoy touching up photos, especially landscapes. I do not have a decent camera, may be that is why i try to make up with Photoshop, and a number of other android, windows apps. And sometimes, I go a step forward and really mix things up. Photographs are windows to memories, good ones and bad ones, weird ones, and the ones that you had forgotten. They capture the essence of the moment, and keep them frozen forever. I have this one particular picture lying between the books in my shelves. You won’t recognize it. But it’s a landscape picture. It belongs to a place, within a crying and shouting mess of human shit called the city, Kathmandu. dusty rusty and living up to its name of a Shangri la only on the dark side of things. The city so true that it reminds me how futile my poems are and no matter how much I write about being in love and peace and things that soothe the heart, there is always a darker and a much stronger force. The force of memories that were locked in the cascade of thoughts and enclosed in golden envelopes and marked as wonderful but the decay through time as made it bitter. Today i dust of the picture and take it out of the shelves, from within the books I never read. I have dismantled the shapes and the color like a spy code, an encryption for the world, like a password to that part of my day, that thought in my head, which can still crunch my heart and juice tears off my eyes. Even she wont recognize the place, despite we being together when I clicked the picture. Today, my deformations of the shapes in the picture, the Photoshop filters that deteriorate the reality only to prevent recognition, make more and more sense.
Today, my memories of that day, that feeling and the person has changed and been distorted. Through the filter of blame and self-blame and days that went in silence and tears and roses that were discarded, of gifts that were burned down I see the picture to be more real than it ever was, It might make no fucking sense but the edits have been real. my memory is as fuzzy as the picture is, and it portrays correctly how I feel right now.
Samip Dhungel's Poetry Blog 