English Teachers Will Hate You...(2004)

The full title of this piece is actually "English Teachers Will Hate You if This is Your Paragraph Structure... (Yet I Did This for a Reason)", but that takes up a lot of space.
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The photograph...God, you can't help but think about that picture--stare at it for hours. You don't know how to feel about it. I mean, are you happy or sad? Is it possible for one to desperately desire to laugh and cry and scream and sleep all in the same breath? It seems that the picture forces everything inside of you to boil to the surface, and nothing is left afterwards. Gone. Evaporated. Empty yet fulfilled. You don't know what it means, and the more you think about it, the less you understand it. If you've ever wondered why some cultures fear the taking of a photograph, let me suggest that you peruse one rather closely. It's haunting. You see yourself or your friends frozen in time, unable to be anything but what you are they are at that precise moment. A piece of life stolen from you and bled onto a glossy sheet of paper...Sometimes that hurts when you lose what the picture is trying to convey. It hurts to feel that sometimes you can never again have what you see directly in front of you. It's draining--and it's a rush--and you can't help but feel it when your mind refuses to believe that anything else exists in the presently minute atmosphere of your reminiscence. You have to think to breathe because all of your energy is dedicated to satisfying the conflicting desires of your soul. You want the pain to stop, yet forgetting means it never existed. All the structure collapses.; all the walls and fortresses erected for the protection of your most fragile pieces burn in a grey flame whose essence can be felt and breathed in times subsequent. The mental chaos spawned in such moments foils the order intended to be conveyed in the photograph. The single, purified, mint-condition occurrence becomes clouded and soiled with human emotion. No longer cold, inanimate sheet and ink, its faces wail to you. They speak the things that you cannot. They bring forth your tears and allow you to move on. You may stare at that photograph for 1 or 1 million moments, yet it is all the same to you. You close your book, hide the faces that made you feel what it is to be alive, and all the while that you go about your mundane, monotonous existence, that shiny sheet lies there in waiting for your return to once again pound and sear into your soul the ultimate fact that you are alive.