headed toward innocence.

I once wandered into a Hallmark Store and walked directly to the back, where all of the big, overpriced photo albums with fancy adhesive backs, plastic covering, and indexed pages stood proudly above huge stacks of photo cover sheets, refill pages, and scrapbooking supplies scattered on different hooks. It was a large and intimidating wooden wall with a lot of barcodes all over it, and I looked up and down at it a few times, mainly because I kept glancing down at my wallet to imagine the greenery inside slipping out.

I walked out with a bag that was almost too big for me to hide in my tote bag, and a periwinkle photo album that included everything but the smell of childhood nostalgia was inside.

I got to my room, threw the bag to the side, and waited until my mom had left the next morning to take the album out of its box and then travel to the stairs, where piles of photographs had ended up after spring cleaning. I fixed myself breakfast and then picked up the entire container and brought them upstairs, where I sorted through them for hours. I found memories I had forgotten and memories I had framed in my mind for a decade and a half; there were pictures of me in halloween costumes and Communion dresses long forgotten and I remembered what it was like to live in Puerto Rico, where the sun is always shining (at least when the camera is out) and gently sorted through photographs of my grandmother when her hair was still black, and then when her hair was still gray, until I finally found photographs of me and her stark white-haired self standing tangent to each other on the grass. I relived around 14 years of my life in what felt like an instant and managed to sort it into neat, clean piles- album, not album, keep. I took the small "keep" stack to my room, where I tried to prop them up and also contemplated hanging them up in my dorm room. Among them were me in my Lion King sundress at a birthday party on my Grandmother's porch, Rocky and I emblazoned in bright ink as we giggle beneath a beautiful, towering, (fake) tree, and even photographs I would never remember, like my mom in her twenties laughing at my Grandma's dinner table. I set them aside because I knew eventually I could piece them together again.

I put the other stacks where they belonged; I packed up Honeymoon photos long ignored, reorganized Halloween parades outside of my school, filed away my dance concerts and my brother's various game-themed cake tops- all part of a vast conspiracy to narrow mine, my brother's, and my mother's lives together into 10 slim scrapbook-style pages. I reminded myself of that as I shuffled through treasure troves of sundresses, sunhats, beach shorts, and toddler-sized tuxes, and eventually placed the box at the bottom of the stairs.

The album pile took me the longest, but I hurried through it in an effort to finish in time. I organized the photographs by time, by event, by person, by emotion. I scattered them throughout the pages, not placing stickers or any additional trinkets on the page, knowing that the raw emotion of those photographs would be enough. I placed and replaced them, moving them multiple times in an effort to best complete the album and fit all of the pictures into it. I chose a photograph for the cover and closed the album when I was done, quickly closing it into its box and then rushing to hide it beneath a pile of stuffed animals and blankets in my room.

I wrote out the card for it days later, after I had already taken advantage of my days at home alone to take out the album and dream about the memories in it. I was ready to give it away when I did, but I remember wondering if it was right. I paused sometimes at the idea, and I wanted it to be perfect.

The box was small, if not essentially a decoy gift to not make my mother worry I'd 'done too much.' We live in a family of people who hate when other people 'do too much' for them. Gifts, bringing meals, baking desserts, visiting, showing up for birthdays, are all 'too much,' but we persist. She opened the box and I thought about turning away, running from the nostalgia inside. I knew she was going to react immediately and I was afraid to let that happen without a disclaimer, which is something I usually accompany gifts with to make up for the awkward silences that follow you breaking someone's wish list or getting them something that proves you no longer know each other anymore. I am afraid of that silence, and I fill it with "I saw this and thought you would like it because ________" to get them to understand themselves the way I can't, and I sometimes interject, "I thought this would be good because I _____," mostly because when I shop for gifts I constantly wonder why I buy them.

I stood and smiled, and she opened each page as if it were a chapter in a novel. The best part, perhaps, is that although the three of us star in that novel, she was most happy about her co-stars. She exclaimed about my recital pictures and Rocky's baseball photos. She smiled about Puerto Rico Halloweens where I scrambled around as a lion (fitting) and a clown (also fitting) before I could even have explained what they were. She even laughed at pictures of us at events I had forgotten entirely, but enjoyed my hair in.

I used to wonder after I lost the album to the other room in my home if I had done it right. I wondered if I should have left it on her bed when I left for college, so that when she returned it would be there to remind her I was coming back. I wondered if I was supposed to leave behind new pages with each return home, as if leaving was less painful with reminders of why I should have stayed.

I left for college two weeks after that photo album, and I still remember it occasionally as one of my best gifts. Sometimes, I still envision myself sorting through the photographs, sitting with my legs crossed "indian style" in shorts and a white tee, wiping my eyes as time passed even faster than it had been all summer. The heat hits me through the window, the dog whines, and I fix myself lunch in between, washing dust off of my fingers in the middle of the process and then wondering why I hadn't bought reams on top of reams of refill paper for that album. I could have spent days with them.