a picture...

“We have all said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s a cliche. Everyone knows it. But we don’t truly understand it yet. Then, one day, a picture knocks us off of our feet. And a thousand, no a million, words come buzzing into our head like bees come to honey (there’s another cliche for you). Maybe we saw a Manet at the Met. You know, the one he painted of Monet’s family? And suddenly, you realize that these dashes on a canvas that make people are not two dimensional. The picture itself is, but the people depicted are not. This is another painter, a best friend, a husband, a father, a gardener. This is a mother, a meticulously ironed dress. This is a son and a sweaty blue play suit and exhaustion after running through the garden. We see so many words in this one picture. Maybe it wasn’t a painting though. Maybe it was a picture that popped up in our Facebook newsfeed. We don’t know the girl who is in the picture. We only barely know the girl who posted it. The girl in the picture is smoking a cigarette and she is looking away and we can’t tell if she’s sad or thinking about life or maybe just thinking about whatever she ate for dinner tonight. She’s letting the smoke out of her mouth in a lazy way and she is someone’s child, someone’s love, someone’s sister, someone’s something. And you will never know exactly who or what she is to anyone besides a face on your screen tonight. But those possibilities? There’s where the thousand words come in. The possibility.”