The days we keep
How we will remember without performing a childhood. A few days kept well. Letters. A voice. An album that can survive a lost phone.
We will not narrate every second of their life into a camera. A childhood performed for a feed is a childhood half-lived. We will keep a few days so well that the rest can live in the body — ours and theirs.
Keep less. Keep it where it cannot vanish.
How we will keep the days
- 01
Ten photographs a month, not a thousand
Faces. Hands. The room as it was. We print or we file. A phone is a pocket, not an archive.
- 02
One letter each season
A page to them: what the house was like, what they loved, what we got wrong. Dated. Kept together. Not posted.
- 03
A voice, once in a while
Their early sound. Our speaking their name. A song. Sound returns a room that a photograph cannot.
- 04
Objects with a story
The sweater, the book, the spoon. Not a museum. A box that can be opened without shame at the mess of having lived.
What we will not do
A camera between every gaze
If we cannot see them without a lens, we put the lens down. They are studying our face. They did not come for a still.
A feed as the album
Public is a choice we will make rarely and late. A baby cannot consent to being a character.
Milestones as a scoreboard
We may write the first word. We will not make a grid of firsts that turns a year into a race we must publish.
If you are reading this as the child we wrote it for: we tried to stay in the room. We tried to keep a few days. We will have failed some Tuesdays. The letters will say which ones. That is also a kind of love — not the perfect year, the true one.
What this whole book is for
- A person who was answered
- A house that can tell the truth about how it began
- A box, a file, a letter — enough to find our way back