Now that’s what I call a perfect family!
The kids; one boy, one girl, have just the right age difference between them. The little girl has her mother’s tumbling black hair and her dad’s big eyes. The boy, though does not show any striking resemblance to either parent, seems to be attached to his mother with glue.
They are sitting on a blue beach mat with a picnic spread around them. A red ball is resting on a juice bottle and a stuffed teddy stares at the little girl with his ever awake wide wondering eyes. The girl is busy digging sand for the under construction castle next to her, which looks way too good to have been made by such tiny hands. Maybe her mother was helping her earlier, who is now attending to the little boy’s need for attention. He is smiling so hard that it seems she must have just tickled him. Dad dear is relaxing and looking extremely handsome. Specially with the light falling on his face, lighting up his eyes and smile and hair and torso, making it very difficult for me to take my eyes off him. It’s making me uncomfortable. To add to that all four are staring right back into my eyes, frozen for that second simultaneously, leaving aside everything they were doing.
Their smiles are so contagious that the ends of my lips almost curl upwards, but they stop midway as a thought strikes me. “What if this family, I mean these people, what if they were put together, just for this particular photo shoot? What if their love for each other was a rehearsed lie? Maybe they never saw each other ever again after this perfect moment was achieved and captured.”
But then I stop this chain of thought and let my lips smile. So what if it was fake, this moment was way happier than any that I was deciding to replace it with for past one hour.
I stuff my solo pictures back into the drawer where they belong. What was gifted to me was not a photo frame, it was this posed moment of happiness that came along with the frame. I could not make myself replace it with loneliness.