Mummified Souls

Mummified Souls
Amidst the folds of my old papers, I stumbled upon a solitary photograph…
I stood rooted before it for a long time; its charm lay not in its beauty, but in the fact that those who possessed those features were once the very galaxy in whose orbit I revolved.
Faces separated from me only by my own breaths, laughter we believed to be eternal and immune to decay, and days lived with childlike innocence—unaware that we were drinking from a goblet of abiding nostalgia that would later burn our souls.
I gazed at myself in that trapped speck of time; I was tender and unbroken, far less shattered, and foolishly confident that the paradise we inhabited would never fade. Yet life did not gamble on our opinions, nor did it ask our permission; it tore us apart, altered our inner souls, and snatched from right before our eyes spirits whose loss we would never have been prepared for, even if our faces had grown gray with age.
I returned the photograph to its darkness, the ache of truth squeezing my heart: time does not merely steal our numerical years—it uproots faces, sanctuaries, and dreams alongside them. It leaves us with nothing but the debris of memories to which we retreat whenever we long for the living beings we once were.
For some photographs do not merely preserve the features of a face; they mummify the rebirth of an entire life… whose pulse will never return after today.