Found
I found this ripped up photo thrown in the street in Paris in 1997. Cold, windy afternoon. A few pieces had already blown away, but I must've gotten there just a moment after it landed.
I've always wondered who tore it to shreds.
The bride? "Damn I looked fat. Look how fat."
The groom? "It was her sister I wanted. It's her sister I love."
The maid of honor? "I know she's my only sister. But I hate her."
Or maybe there was no drama at all beyond it being a blurry photo that was discarded. But tossing it to the pavement seems to make more of a statement than that.
Then again, the statement may only be about me, since I felt the need to bend down in the cold to pick up the pieces of these strangers.
Any theories?
posted by Candy Rant @ 9:54 PM
22 Comments:
At 1:42 AM,
Steve B said…
Probably something as simple as she/he caught him/her cheating, and in a heated argument after he/she threw her/him out of the apartment, tore up the photo and threw it in his/her face.
The she/he just let the pieces fall, a tragic metaphor for his/her life as the shattered pieces fell to the ground. He/she bent his/her head and slowly walked away, leaving that life behind him/her.
At 7:36 AM,
Anonymous said…
I think that it was a friend of the bride's. They all went to college together. She was secretly in love with the groom. Her friend sent her a picture from the wedding. She was walking along, alone, opening up her mail. She was happy to see a letter from her friend. Then, she reads about the fabulous wedding and sees the picture....and her heart breaks into a hundred pieces. Tears begin welling up in her eyes and she tears the picture to shreds, reminded again of the love for the man that she left home and moved to Paris to forget.
How do I know this? I was the one who tore that picture to shreds on that grey day in 1997.
OK. Not really. But you gasped in shock, didn't you?
Alright. No, you didn't.
At 7:58 AM,
prairie biker said…
I find it more amazing that you even saved this relic. Is this the one memorable memento that began your descent into bag-ladyhood? When you start collecting other people's trash, there are issues there that need to be resolved.
At 10:17 AM,
Dana said…
He was a Russian spy in Paris sent to obtain top secret documents from a beautiful French physicist and then kill her. He worked quickly sweeping her off her feet and marrying her within a few short months.
One day soon after the marriage, she caught him in her office taking photos of her life's work. He did not see her as she hid herself watching him. It was then she discovered his secret. It broke her heart, but she agreed to help the French Secret Service capture him. She did so out of patriotism to her beloved France. They devised a plan to lead him into the DGSE's trap.
Somewhere hidden within the picture was a code. It was to be torn and left there to be found by the French agent who was assigned to her case.
You found it instead and they charged her with treason. He barely made his escape.
The French Secret Service has been following you this many years to wait until you reveal the whereabouts of the picture.
Either that or it was the staged photo inside a purchased frame, the person tore that up when they opened their package. And I've seen one too many silly spy movies.
At 10:48 AM,
Candy Rant said…
Steve, your pronoun politically correctness is beyond charming.
And it makes everything flow so beautifully too, don't it?
At 10:49 AM,
Candy Rant said…
Futuresis, that sounds like one of Paul Harvey's endings: "And the name of that boy was Teddy Roosevelt."
HAAA! How dare you make me gasp.
At 11:40 AM,
Carin said…
Wedding night surprise? Perhaps she was a HE?!?
An upsetting situation. And, naturally you wouldn't want to keep the pictures.
At 11:52 AM,
Candy Rant said…
I can't believe I've overlooked that possibility all these years. It was all about Le Game de la Crying.
At 12:47 PM,
Jerry said…
I don't know anything about your private life, but I think I would pick that up if I felt a kinship with the people in it. Perhaps, at that time you felt like your relationship was torn--perhaps flawed in some way.
Emotionally, you may have felt like your marriage was in the midst of dissolving into pieces. By picking up the picture and putting it together, perhaps you were symbolically trying to do the same thing for a relationship you had at the moment.
An analyst might say that your heart was shattered and you wanted to put it back together.
Maybe I'm full of shit.
At 1:08 PM,
Candy Rant said…
Jerry, that's a great theory. Especially since my marriage ended about a month after that.
The only possible flaw in the theory is that I couldn't tell what the photo was OF until I picked it up. So the kinship was more like just nosiness. I'd have bent down to see what it was even if I suspected it was an innard snapshot of a yak's esophogeal track.
But still, it was a puzzle to put together, and my own personal one wasn't going to snap into place right then.
At 5:32 PM,
Steve B said…
Candy,
I/we am/are glad that you/they enjoyed my/our little descent into verbal/grammatical madness/insanity.
At 5:35 PM,
Candy Rant said…
AGGGHHH! AGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!
tick...tick...tick...
head
explodes
At 5:52 PM,
Ana Martin said…
She hated the hat and she hated the foofy dress. After she lost forty pounds she and her hunky husband had a second wedding in Bora Bora. She wore a thong bikini bottom but since she'd had her boobs done--and they were fabulous--she didn't wear anything else. That was the picture she was sending with the wedding announcement.
At 6:00 PM,
Candy Rant said…
Indeed, that is a VERY foofy dress. JCPenney all the way. I got nothin against Penneys, just Penneys doing foofy.
I want that vacation. Where do I sign up? I'll start dieting now.
At 7:37 PM,
Ana Martin said…
Foooooofeeeeeee. You could make a Christmas ornament of it! You could laminate the individual pieces and hang them all over the tree and then have a contest! Time people as they find and put together the Christmas ornament puzzle. The winner gets...gets...I dunno. Do you have a potato that looks like Bob Marley?
At 9:19 PM,
Domhan said…
Theory: it was performance art.
Those photo pieces were planted. You were filmed as you picked them up. The pieces have some sort of visual tracking device, kind of like the witch's crystal ball in the Wizard of Oz. The performance art that is attached to these pieces of photo is still going on to this day, and we are now ALL a part of it. We are all now being "filmed" in a wild interaction with these torn bits of photo paper.
The people in the photo? Oh, just some people.
At 2:47 PM,
Tony from the Bronx said…
Odd....very odd....it just happens that at the very moment that you suggested that even a discarded picture of a yak's esophageal track would interest you, I happened to be examining a innard snapshot of a yak's esophageal track. I won't bore you with the reason why I was so doing, but it concerned the theft from a Himalayan temple of an immense diamond implanted in the forehead of a heathen idol. The culprit was suspected to be a specially trained yak that ingested the priceless treasure before swallowing a cyanide pill.
Now as for the bride--I don't know--how the hell would I know?--but I bet it has something to do with eHarmony.com.
At 4:30 PM,
Domhan said…
OH! Funny stuff, T from the B!
When I look at the torn picture again, I imagine an ad for eHarmony.com. Or maybe an ad for a competitor of eHarmony. Bwahahahaha!
Maybe I can turn this into a visual rhetoric example for my students!
I swear to god, Candy. Everything you gots is teaching fodder! (Especially them bananas!)
At 5:32 PM,
Candy Rant said…
Tony, What would I do without you?
I love your tale of the heathen idol. Is that anything like American Idol?
Eharmony. Heh. No comment.
At 5:33 PM,
Candy Rant said…
Domhan, you have no idea how significant it is that you mentioned bananas. But you will know tomorrow.
At 6:48 PM,
Steve B said…
You seem to have completely missed the possibility that it was a prop for some deranged serial killer, and it's actually a clue to his next victims.
Or, it was. Until you picked it up. Now it's too late...for them.
At 7:16 PM,
Candy Rant said…
I knew it. I knew I shouldn't have picked it up. I've caused 3 murders. Because of course she was probably pregnant too.
Is it less of a big deal since they were French?
Oops. Kidding.
Mostly.
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