Old Pictures Lost, Found.

A few weeks after we met in 2010, Chan went to North Carolina for Christmas with his family. I spent that Christmas with friends upstate. It snowed that year in North Carolina, which is probably rare, and Chan sent me some photos of him and his siblings with a snowman they built in the front yard. Since we’d known each other such a short time, it felt like a big deal, that he sent the photos, and called, while he was away.

I lost my early correspondence with Chan when I left my old Yahoo account, and I thought the photos were gone forever, but Chan’s sister found some of them on her phone this Christmas. There are two additional ones in my memory, one of Chan alone with the snowman and another of him, a selfie maybe, inside, standing in front of the Christmas tree. (The first might be a false memory, but the second one I’m sure of.)

We talked on the phone while he was in North Carolina. I asked him what his family does for Christmas and I so clearly remember him saying, “Not much, we sit around and talk, we eat, we play games.”