Demain is a word that I learned in Arles this summer;
the meaning is ‘tomorrow’.
I say ‘demain’ and wave my hand to a French friend that I have just made.
Both of us, smiling at each other like a child.
I felt a sense of nostalgia towards the word ‘tomorrow’.
During my childhood, a day with friends was always concluded with a phrase ‘see you tomorrow’
but, eventually the phrase was replaced by a word ‘good-bye’.
Tomorrow was no longer a continuation of today.
From my deceased mother’s belongings, I found a roll of monochrome negative stored in a paper box.
I looked through the film against a light and what I saw there was my family,
surrounding a small Japanese style table.
Assuming from the setting, it was taken on my younger sister’s Weaning ceremony*.
My father holds my sister on his lap and,
my grandmother and I are in the shot
which means that this particular shot was taken by my mother.
Among the photos that looked almost identical, I realized that
there is a shot that is heavily tilted to the left. Out of curiosity,
I decided to develop the negative and noticed
there were my father, sister, grandmother and mother
but I was missing.
The reason for it was because I was the one that released the shutter for this shot,
probably for the very first time in my life. My father was 37 years old,
my mother 28 and I was still 4. It was one summer from 50 years ago.
Both my father and mother are much younger than myself today.
What was captured in the photo was a time in the history where people believed that
tomorrow would be better than today.
My desire is to continue taking photos like the ones found in an old album.
*A ceremony to celebrate the 100th days after the birth of a newborn child. A.k.a okuizome
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