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.

UPDATE 9/24:

Opened the folder again last night. told myself I wasnt going to, said it right there above this line, and then four in the morning I moved the mouse and it was already open, or I opened it myself, one of those two things happened and I do not fully trust which. same photo. same album, not mine, still not mine. six mounts on the right hand page, I counted six the first time and I wrote six, its right there above this line, except last night there were seven. the seventh sits low, cut close against the bottom edge like the scan ran out of glass before it ran out of page, and before anyone says I miscounted the first time, fine, maybe I did, except the shadow ring on the seventh one is more yellow than the other six, older glue, which means if I miscounted six months ago I miscounted a mount that had already been sitting empty longer than the ones next to it. Thats not how miscounting works. Thats not how anything works.

The file's modified date has not moved. still says March, I checked the properties twice standing in the kitchen with the laptop balanced on the toaster oven because thats where the outlet is that doesnt trip the breaker, my mother kept a radio on that same counter for thirty years and it never once tripped anything either. anyway. A file does not grow a seventh empty frame in six months and keep the same modified date unless the date was never measuring what I thought it was measuring, which is a different problem, and I am not opening that folder a third time tonight to find out.

This is the same shape as the forty minutes that went missing off the fence job last month, a gap where there should have been continuous time, and I said back then I was not saying the two things were related. Im not writing that line again. The album entry above still says six. Its wrong now. Im leaving it wrong.