Picture Blurry
My favorite postcard from Wanjiru was technically a mistake. A pocket photograph. Entirely accidental. Blurry sky. Half a thumb covering the lens. Tilted eucalyptus branches leaning diagonally like tired church ushers. Somewhere at the corner, sunlight collapsing awkwardly into whiteness.
Objectively useless photograph. Perfect photograph. Life rarely announces itself properly while occurring.
Most meaningful moments are partially obscured. My daughter laughing from another room while I am distracted teaching boring econometrics class to very cheerful class on a buffering Zoom powered by the nice and jolly Telkom state of the nation internet.
A parent aging gradually between holidays. Friends becoming family accidentally through accumulated ordinary Tuesdays. Surviving more pain than language can accurately archive.
Blur belongs to memory honestly.
I remember one evening after my fourth cycle sitting outside with a neighbor who repaired radios for a living. He smoked thoughtfully while dismantling a broken transistor beside me.
“You know what is wrong with modern people?” he asked.
“Everything?”
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“Too much evidence.”
I laughed.
“No seriously,” he continued. “People photograph experiences before fully feeling them. Then later they require pictures to prove happiness occurred.”
He tapped the broken radio gently.
“Old radios were better. Static included. You had to participate in listening.”
Years later I still think about his words whenever I catch myself trying too aggressively to document life instead of inhabit it.
Perhaps this is why blurry countryside photographs disturb me emotionally. They resist certainty. They leave room for participation. For imagination. For longing. For the observer observing himself observing the world and suddenly realizing the world has been observing him back the entire time, patiently, through trees and weather and strangers and cattle and exhausted sunsets and random postcards arriving exactly when despair had begun reorganizing the furniture internally.
