File note: illusion of self. found this on the desktop three, maybe four days after I first went looking for it, I do not save a file and then forget where I put it, that is not a thing I do, so either somebody else opened this folder or I did and do not remember doing it, which is worse.

it is a photo of a photo album, not mine, somebody's. six mounts on the right hand page and every single one of them empty, just the pale rectangle where a print used to sit and a shadow ring around the rectangle where the glue held it thirty, forty years longer than the print did. the left page still has its photographs, labeled, ordinary, some old European trip. the right page has nothing, and the top left mount reads almost like the missing-minutes gap I already logged once, an absence with a shape to it instead of just an absence.

I do not know whose album this was. I do not know why the file's modified date does not match anything on my calendar. I am not saying the two things are related. I am saying they are both sitting on my desktop and I cannot explain either one, and that is worth writing down. I have not opened the folder again since. not on purpose. I just have not needed to, is what I keep telling myself.