THE FAMILY ALBUM WITH MISSING PAGES

I am a collection of memories, a leather-bound book filled with faces that smile from another time. People call me a family album, but I am also a keeper of ghosts, a silent witness to a story told through absences and erasures. I am the family album with missing pages.

I begin with a photograph of a young couple, their faces shining with the hopeful promise of a life yet to be lived. Their world is a black-and-white landscape of love and shared dreams. The next few pages are packed with the chaos and joy of a growing family: a baby’s first smile, a child’s first steps, the triumphant grin of a boy with a missing tooth. The photographs tell a beautiful story, a perfect, unbroken line of happiness.

But then, the story stops. A page is torn out, leaving a jagged, empty space where a photograph once was. This is where things get difficult. The faces in the following pictures show a little more strain, the smiles seem less carefree. The person who was once here is now an absence, a ghost in the frame. The remaining photographs clash with the emptiness of the missing page. The laughing eyes of a grandmother seem to question the void. The hand of a father holding a child seems to reach for someone who is no longer there.

Further in, another page is missing. This time, it’s a photograph of a beloved son, a young man with a bright future. The page is gone, but the love for him remains, a silent, unyielding presence. The photographs of his parents, now older and filled with a new kind of sadness, struggle with the space where his face should have been. The album is no longer just a collection of memories; it is a monument to grief too painful to confront. Tearing out the page was not an act of forgetting but a desperate attempt to erase a pain that refused to fade.

I am a family album, but I also carry a family's unspoken sorrows. I am a book of photographs that refuse to fade, arguing with the emptiness of the missing pages. The pictures tell a story of what was, and the absences reveal what was lost. I record a family’s love and their grief, a silent tribute to the story both in and out of the frame.