The Architecture of Return

Time is not a straight line, though we often draw it that way. It is more like a tide, pulling us out into the deep, then washing us back to the same shore, changed by the salt and the pressure of the depths. When we meet someone who has been absent, we are not looking at the person we left behind. We are looking at a map of everywhere they have been since the last goodbye. We search their eyes for the geography of their recent winters, the way their laughter has shifted its pitch, or how the light now catches the lines they have earned. It is a quiet, heavy work, this reading of a face. We are trying to reconcile the memory we kept in a box with the living, breathing truth standing before us. Do we ever truly return to the same place, or are we always just visiting the ghosts of who we used to be?

Somnath Chakraborty has captured this delicate weight in his image titled Long Time No See. It feels like a conversation held in the quiet spaces between heartbeats, doesn’t it? What do you see when you look into the eyes of someone you haven’t held in years?