Snapshot

I have that picture from our wedding day where the sun catches your face, illuminating it – it’s the kind of light you only get on a sunny day in spring when the beech leaves are dabs of vibrant green about to burst open. It was a snapshot, a perfect moment we can never relive, immortalised on film. You aren’t looking at the camera but off to one side, smiling at someone in the crowd.

And I’m standing next to you, slightly awkwardly, looking like I can’t believe my luck to have found myself with such a beautiful women. And now I remember who you’re smiling at off-camera: our son. Had another camera been documenting the scene from behind, it would have caught him smiling back.

It’s the picture we used as the defining moment of the day when we sent the weblink to the hundreds of others photographs capturing the day. Put them together and you could almost make a film, played in slow motion, like a child might thumb through a flick book.

But pan out, step out of that picture and into another frame entirely. It feels as though I’ve been jerked out of that day and pulled by the scruff of my neck into today. It’s spring again but this time the sun struggles to break through the clouds. And everything is so entirely different. I wouldn’t take a photograph of my life today. I would find it hard to smile if you asked.

Enjoy every second, they told me about my wedding day, it goes so fast. And it did. As fast as a car swings round a bend, mounts the curb and one minute you’re bent down to tie your shoelace and the next you’re not. What happened in that snapshot defines my life forever.