I stand in the ribs of a raw house. In the distance. There it lies in the distance, the old home. As is the way with dreams, the door and stairwell lie on the opposite side of what I remember. There’s something about the exposure, the light of the image—white noise seeping out around the edges. Not fog or rain, not movement, but age. Caught with the greytones of an archival snapshot fading. I stand in the bare ribs of a new construction and watch as the two figures climb the new-sided stairwell. An old teacher and an old lover, one follows the other.

Something I was reading last night: “Paradoxically, for Benjamin, as the iconic and spatial characteristics of photography became more accurate by decreasing the interval of exposure, the image lost its temporal anchoring in the experience of duration, as well as the fascinating ambiguity of its ‘aura’” (Roderick 9).

This is something I’ve been thinking about: a scientist named Marey out to capture time. To capture time by capturing movement, breaking the stream into a thousand, then a million, distillations of image all caught in the frame of one plate. What he discovered was that the closer he caught to catching movement, the further he got from understanding. That is, the more light entering the plate, the more vision blurs until all that remains is white noise. Too many photons. Legibility, as they put it, falls away.

But Benjamin was pointing out the loss of instantaneity. How, by contrast, a representation with long duration can hold a time, an anchor in time. The question: legibility or time?

The house the two figures enter is one I remember well. My initials are carved into the lower-floor room. It is the house my mother built. She still has the house plans, I think because she put so many dreams into its construction. It is the first house she built after losing her husband and taking her two young children far far into the distance where she would take care of them herself. The struggle of her years. The house was not the first thing she built, but it was a tangible one.

I once sleepwalked in that house, once wandered around the living room moaning and crying. Every particle of the house had somehow changed. Everything was different, right down to the atoms. The landscaped had shifted, and what was once, had left. And somehow it was my fault and I couldn’t put it right. So I sleepwalked moaning and crying until my mother came to the balcony.

“What are you doing?”
“The house,” I whispered. “It’s changed, it’s all gone. I can’t put it back.”
“Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It’s only a dream.”

But now I wonder.

Memory is the template of time. It is where the traces live. Freud argued that everything was there.

Maybe I was just remembering the future. Maybe the shutter caught on itself.

The lower-level room still has my initials etched into the closet. I carved them there when we moved out of the house four years after we moved in. It was the first place that felt like home in a long time. The window in my room perfectly framed the Big Dipper in winter, and I refused to close the shades when I was getting dressed. Off in the distance, I could just see the ocean, and off in the background I could hear my mother and sister laughing.

We vacated that house ages ago, ages ago. My mother sold it to a family who kept it up nicely, continued planting in the yard she terraced out of the mud. When I’m in town, I sometimes go by the old skeleton, look at all the new development surrounding it and blocking its view, and think it’s a good thing we got away from it when we did.

But I also remember the kittens abandoned by their mother. They lived with me in the concrete basement and shat on my covers in the night until I trained them, one by one, to find the litter box, to clean themselves up afterwards. I washed their little bodies with a napkin, using the motion of a good mother cat so they’d understand what to do. I played softball in the back yard with my dog. No matter how far I hit the ball, he’d always bring it back, of course covered in slobber. I cooked in this house, I sleepwalked in this house, I fell down the basement stairs in this house and was covered with bruises all along my thigh.

From the raw bones of my view, where the stairwell is on the opposite side than reality, I watch them make their way up the stairs of a house that hasn’t been mine in ages. The shutter seems caught open and the edges of this image grow fuzzier and fuzzier. The room that once was mine is their office. The carpeting has been ripped up, and a desk with computer cables twines out under the window. My initials are still there. Upstairs, the room with the slanty roof that my mother designed has three windows to capture each Northeastern angle. Perfect windows to climb up to at night to watch the northern lights. To breathe softly next to my mother in the dark as we watched the sky bulge and concave with color. This is the room where they make love. Make love under the colors.

From the distance, I can see all the time. My mind like an archive. But photographs are far away and removed. They exist outside of the self, and are something to merely wax rhapsodic over. And when the shutter stays open, everything falls away… all that is left is the ‘aura,’ the sensation of time existing and passing, a replica of movement, a failure. What goes missing with duration is the sense. Everything is captured but nothing is seen. Time leaks out on the white fuzzy blur at the edges. Time doesn’t so much as overlap as it rubs out the distinction. My home, someone else’s home: who knows which came first? Who knows who owns time?

Maybe my initials are the only anchor available.

But it doesn’t have to make sense: I open my eyes with a snap. And come here, to this place of dwelling.