A lifter found an old photograph in a drawer,
from a summer they mostly remembered as the summer of feeling terrible about it.

What stopped them was not the picture.
On the back, under the date, they had written a sentence.

They had said that sentence again that morning,
in the same order, in the same tone, about a different body entirely.

The photograph had aged. The sentence had not aged at all.

The Book of Mirrors 23:8