Where I Used to Smile

day 13 of 30

The photograph shouldn’t exist.
I’m sitting by a lake, a guitar resting against my knee, smiling as if nothing in the world could hurt me. I don’t remember the lake, or the guitar, or what it felt like to smile that way.

After the accident, people told me things about myself, songs I wrote, places I played, the kind of person I used to be. But memory doesn’t return like they say. It doesn’t bloom. It flickers, like static. You catch an image, a sound, and then it’s gone.

I drove north to find the lake. Late autumn, the air brittle, the trees stripped bare. I followed the roads until I found the water from the photograph. The same house leaned at the shore, the same chipped blue shutters. Everything was quieter than it should have been.

Inside, the furniture was covered in sheets. Dust lay on everything but the piano keys. Someone had played recently. I touched a note, a soft, wounded sound. And then another. My hands knew what to do. My mind didn’t.

I found a page of lyrics near the window. My handwriting. The words blurred, smudged by something, rain or tears.

“I’ll keep forgetting until I find the place
where I used to smile.”

I should have felt comfort. Instead, a weight settled behind my ribs.
Because standing in that empty house, I realized something simple and terrible:

I hadn’t lost my memory.
I had buried it.

And the woman in the photograph, the one smiling so easily, wasn’t someone I’d forgotten.
She was someone I had left behind.