Angel

I got this photo from this link http://g8.no/index.php. I have no idea who the photoblogger is but his pictures there are all amazing. The first time I looked at this particular photo, I couldn't take my eyes off the little girl. This photo captured her soul and it spoke to me. I fell in love with her instantaneously. The idea that occurred to me at that moment was that if I had a blog I would definitely post her picture there. So I made a blog to honor her picture.

All I know about this angel is that she is Indian. Take note of the wafer bread she is holding, a definite staple in the Indian diet. But whatever dearth of basic information is more than made up by her soulful eyes. Her piercing gaze challenges us to look into her soul, to read and fathom its young life's content. They say that the eyes are windows to our soul and in this specific instance as immortalized by one man's photo, she tells us everything, her sad past, troubled present and uncertain future. She reveals to us all of her unadulterated soul's content.

I maybe have a similar childhood photo nakedly capturing the entirety of my life. That photo is still etched on my mind, in there I was holding my ragtag doll sheepishly looking in the camera that reflected my sad, lucent eyes. And just like this little angel, I was in an identical state of distress, my clothes, hair and appearance sullied by an afternoon's worth of an innocent child's play. My candid pose exposed the essential me. In contrast, my adult photographs never quite illuminate the real me anymore. Mostly, they look back at me with a diffident demure smile which unfortunately obscures the person beneath that unidimensional photo. The real me eludes the camera as my adult brain instructs me how to pose and smile in a manner that does not compromise the hidden me within. And so I am left with tasteless, unflattering photos that may look good on the exterior but soulless and cold in the interior. I know in my heart, I am not that person, but the real me is obscured by the artifical made-up conscious idea of myself. The real me is submerged, it cannot push itself into the light, but I know it is still there.