I retouch the portraits of the dead at a funeral home.
In my third year on the job, I received a badly damaged black-and-white photo. It originally showed only an old man who had just passed away, but when I restored his right eye, a woman in white suddenly appeared in the corner of the screen.
That woman was me.
The next day, the version of me in the photo took a step forward.
On the third day, she stood behind the old man.
On the fourth day, my face was all that remained in the portrait.
The veteran at the funeral home told me:
"People don't end up in their funeral portraits after they die. They get photographed first, and then they die."
To stay alive, I started changing the fates of the people in the photos.
But every time I saved someone, someone in the real world forgot me.
Then the man no camera could ever capture clearly found me and handed me a group photo from a funeral forty years ago.
He stood beside the coffin in the picture.
And I stood behind him.
But forty years ago, neither of us had been born yet.
