When my wife and I separated, there were a half dozen or so rolls of film sitting on a bookshelf in our living room. They were filled with pictures from the seven years that we were together (the marriage only lasted 20 months). All of the pictures we took when we were on our respective junior years abroad were there, as were a smattering of art pictures I took during the six month period in the autumn after we graduated when we weren’t quite an official couple.

I learned a lot from that marriage (don’t marry someone you don’t love, but also make damn sure you can live with them, too). One of the things that became obvious before it ended, though, was that we were not picture people.

I took a photography class during our senior year and gravitated to Photoshop because the manual dexterity involved in developing film always left me feeling inept. By the end of the year, I was using the art department’s digital camera and tweaking extensively.

I still love how Photoshop can aid in the creation of something utterly different and yet is still grounded in – originated in – reality. But those are not pictures – colored mementos of events that we want to collect and cherish. Tangible windows on the past that we can hand to a friend years later to connect names to faces in their memories.

It took us almost nine months to get our wedding album back from the wedding photographer (and then only after we initiated legal action). When it arrived, it had the wrong date printed on the cover. It was embossed to indicate that the wedding had occurred one day earlier: September 11, 1998.

Such are the ironies that (in retrospect) plague my memories of my marriage. I have a picture of her in her wedding dress, taken in the church immediately after the ceremony, sitting on my desk at work. She is very beautiful in that picture, radiant and happy. I like to look at that picture from time to time because it helps me remember who I loved and married. I choose to remember her in a positive light because she deserves nothing less.

But those are exceptions to the no pictures rule. We had so many rolls of undeveloped film that I accidentally used on for an independent study without realizing it. Over the pictures I had recently taken were a series that my wife had taken in her dorm in Germany. They showed her neighbor and I transplanting a tiny group of pot plants into empty peanut cans. The overlap of the images made interesting photo-fodder and could be taken as a fairly accurate metaphor for my memories of that long spring break in Muenster.

Sometimes (like now) I think about those rolls of undeveloped film. Whatever happened to them? They were still there when I visited the apartment to discuss the divorce settlement. Did she develop them? Were they discarded when she moved to New Jersey? For the most part, though, I don’t think about the status of those celluloid memories. I have my version and she has hers and how she chose to deal with the film his her problem, not mine.

I don’t mean to sound callous, but I have never understood the point of taking pictures at events – something that did not keep me from being the “take a picture of everyone” guy at my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Other people may have the need for such, but I do not.

Still, the question of that film is like the question of my ex-wife. Is she alive? Is she happy? I’ll never know, really. That’s a different part of my life. That was then, this is now. I enjoy my memories but do not actively pine for the fact that I could be holding them but am not.

I like to think, though, that somewhere, someone is going to develop that film and, through the faded, pitted photos, see a couple of happy kids and wonder about their lives. It seems an apt hope.