Polaroids That Never Faded

I was working as a unit secretary in a psychiatric hospital in a city I lived in for a short time in my 20s.  My desk was part of a larger nurses' stations where rolling carts sat full of case files in three ring notebooks. Around my desk were of all kinds of cabinets full of things like office supplies and hotel-sized shampoo bottles for those who checked into the hospital that had not packed a bag. In the rooms down the hallways were people carrying the heaviest of sorrows.

Days at this job were stressful, but holidays, especially holiday evenings, were strangely peaceful - the phone unusually quiet, a lot of staff on vacation. On these nights, things would get so slow I would open cabinets in the nurses' station and clear out clutter just to keep busy, rustling through shelves or cabinets that had been ignored for years looking for things to organize. The one cabinet I never dared touch was the oddly narrow cabinet with the lock on it behind my desk. I never went looking for the key since I was too scared of what I'd find in the cabinet - I had a strange feeling about it. Even on the busiest of days, I'd look at that cabinet, and think about what could possibly be in there....

It was Christmas night. I was at work. Through the window I could see a gentle snow was falling, snowflakes lit up by the bright light outside shining toward the parking lot. Everyone was calm that night, everyone was quiet.

I had a few more hours on the clock so I looked for ways to busy myself. Every drawer, cabinet and shelf had been cleaned and organized and the only thing left was the strange narrow cabinet door with the lock.  I hesitantly made the decision to ask the charge nurse for the key even though I intuitively knew that what I would see in there would stay with me, haunt me, from the moment I opened the door for the rest of my life. After an extensive search to find the key on that very quiet Christmas night, I turned the lock for the first time in over a decade. 

That is when my heart slid down, heavy and full of pounding ache.

It was a many-years-old group of Polaroids, though not even slightly faded - maybe because light hadn't touched them for so many years.

There were stacks and stacks of Polaroid photos. Each stack, from the front of the cabinet all the way to the far back, was organized by date, wrapped in rubber bands so old and brittle that they broke as I took them off.  It was the images of all the adolescents who had been checked into that hospital in the 1980s and early 1990s - kids who had been depressed or wrought with anxiety, addicted, broken, scared, and scarred. The heaviness of their sorrow was still somehow palpable - I could feel the heaviness of it in my hands as I held the photos.

All the photos were of kids from Generation X.

There was nothing else to do on that Christmas night - the filing was caught up and the phone sat silent - so I looked through the stacks at each person as they had been photographed - standing a few feet away from where I stood at that moment, but in a different decade in time. Polaroids were taken of the patients to put into their case files to help the hospital staff keep track of who they were. In front of a background of institutional looking doors leading to an empty hall were the pictures of these kids, some forcing an obligatory half-smile, some looking really tired, a few with haughty looks and crossed arms in some stance of self-preservation. Outfits worn in those polaroids reflected goth, punk, and suburbia.  Make-up and jewelry showed an era since passed. Sad eyes reflected a time in history when kids earned the collective name Latchkey Kids, when kids earned the collective name Throwaways. 

For a moment, I wanted to scoop up all these photos and take them to my truck sitting frozen in the dark parking lot, to rescue them, to take them home and keep them safely on some shelf, sealed up in some box that could not be opened by the wrong person, by some box that could keep them protected. I asked the charge nurse what I should do with the photos who told me to put them into the bin under my desk where all the hospital's confidential documents would wait to get shredded. I sat in my rolling chair as I slowly and painstakingly placed the photos in the bin one by one and two by two and worried for every face I saw as the images went into the bin, thinking to myself:

Where is this person now, and are they okay?
Are they still alive?

It seems strange that our society is set up in a way that a broken soul checks into a place for a time, for traces of their pain to be written up in notes by caseworkers, for an image of them to be left behind in a dark cabinet and not found until fifteen or so years later.

How could I not be haunted by those photographs that night as I desperately tried to sleep?  How can I not still be haunted by them now?

Sometimes I still dream I'm holding the photos, trying to figure out some safe place to take them. Sometimes I dream I am trying to find a sacred place to carefully hide them.

As I put the last of these kids' images into the bin, I felt this burning within me that these kids' stories should never be forgotten. While I did not know the exact details of their lives, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and knowing what I know now about the general state of society that existed in the growing up years of Generation X, I now know their stories quite well. I know the collective experience they had, that we had. Children were generally not valued in American society in the young years of Generation X, and teenagers were often valued even less.

This job I had at this psychiatric hospital, this glimpse into some of the darkest brokenness of humanity taught me an enormous amount. It also left me with a touch of heaviness that I've never been able to shake.

A few feet from my desk, people had mental breakdowns, EMTs brought in people strapped down to gurneys that the nearby emergency room physically could not handle, I saw things in the hallways that were unspeakable, I was reminded daily of how fragile we all are in the wake of tragedy, addiction, and abuse. I saw depression on faces that showed a deeper despondency that any human should ever have to experience.  But nothing from that place haunts me like the polaroids - those unfaded polaroids.

As someone who both reads and writes a lot about Generation X, I see from others and feel in my own heart the issue that, as a generation, we feel overlooked, not paid attention to. That was the problem of our childhood, of our adolescence, and even of now.  And that has been just one small piece of many larger problems.

I have to believe that God or the saints have somehow saved all the bits and pieces that we left behind - the mementos of our life, the broken pieces, the pictures, both faded and unfaded. I have to believe that they hold them carefully in some safe place until a time when all the sorrows of this world can make sense, when we can all finally be made whole.

Your story is alive, your pain was not for nothing. When the polaroids remain unfaded, do the memories?  When the color is still as vivid as ever, is the pain?

Gen X, you are not forgotten. You are remembered in ways you do not realize, and will continue to be. You are a generation that, according to the cycles of history, does and will contribute a huge amount to society and who does not ask for much in return.  

You are extraordinary for having survived such extraordinary circumstances. 

You, Gen X, are an unfaded polaroid.

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(c) 2015 by Chloe Koffas all rights reserved on writing/images

Why We Need New Beginnings

Northern California at Sunrise -

Photography from the back seat of a car heading through the hills of the Pacheco Pass toward Central California....

A new year begins and I wonder if I filled the last one with everything I should have. Last year is now gone, and if I keep wondering or worrying, I'm not living in the present.  And all we truly have is the present.  










The sun shows its glow, but does not yet show itself -  and it's strange the way a captured moment can look like it is both sunrise and sunset at the same time.

The first time I saw the sun rise over the hills of Northern California was about ten years ago after visiting an Orthodox Christian monastery with friends. I never forgot that morning or how purified my soul felt as we left there. The last time I saw the Northern California sunrise was not so long ago - the sun was both pink and yellow shunting its warming rays on the chilly, tired earth, the hills soft blue in the distance.

So many times I have prayed, asking God, "Where are you?"  or

"Why aren't you listening?"  or

"Why won't you help me?"

And I have finally begun to look back on my life and see how many of those seemingly unheard prayers were being answered incrementally, slowly, then exponentially.

It often happened the way the sun rises so seemingly slowly when you are waiting for it, the way the darkness of night seems so reluctant to leave. Yet we are traveling around the sun at over 66,000 miles an hour.

Morning goes by and noon comes - the sun is full in the sky above us, covering us and our surroundings with 360 degrees of light. 

Sometimes when I see the sun rise, this unexpected peace comes over me that everything is going to be okay - even when a hundred unfitted puzzle pieces lay around waiting for their place in the short term, I know in these moments that the bigger picture will be beautiful when those pieces come together.

Still, we wait for those pieces to come together. And this is why we need new beginnings - because of all that goes wrong in this broken down world. We need new beginnings so we can once again have hope that all those scattered puzzle pieces of our lives will eventually fit together. We need new beginnings because we mess up, because we misunderstand, because we are misunderstood.


Many mornings in my life I did not see the sun rise in this life because I was focused on the scratches on the window.

But the sun continued to rise,

again and again.

Here's to new beginnings, here's to all our dreams coming true - even if not as soon as we would like them to - even if just moment by moment, even if it all happens slowly and incrementally, may it all happen exponentially. 

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(c) 2015 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas, all rights reserved

When God Visits Baseball Fields

Some people say they experience or sense the presence of God in church or some place of worship. Many say that it is more often found in other places - in random places, or places in nature, or during some moment of the human experience. I was at the park with my family recently, and because it's a really new park, hardly anyone yet knows about it so there was hardly anyone there. My family and I had entire baseball fields to walk around on barefoot, the sun was bright, and the breeze was cool. My husband took my daughter to run around in the distance. Since there was no one in sight, I lied down on the grass for a while. When I sat up, I instantly stood up, because it was in this moment I felt that sacred presence.  Because of the solemnity and even the intimacy of moments like these I would normally hesitate to photograph that presence, it felt in that moment that I needed to. Late sunlight came spilling out onto the soft, green grass, and maybe a little bit of the profound peace and warmth I could feel as I stood there with this sense that it is all going to work out - that it is all going to be okay, that it is all going to be amazing. Sometimes God shows up next to the spray of waterfalls, or among the incense during a liturgical offering, or in the warm embrace of someone who wholeheartedly loves you. Sometimes, when the clouds are silver and the sun is perfect, God shows up in baseball fields.  

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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

When the Light Ascends (Week 52 of Fireflies at Dusk: A 52-Week Project)

There is a snapshot image from another time and place that has time-lapsed itself into my soul. It is an image full of a hundred different things entering my senses all at once. The small town Illinois backyard at dusk at my great-grandparent's house would be heavy with summer humidity, the smell of earth, and the feel of soft grass under my feet. When it would become just dark enough, I could see the fireflies illuminating the night. Their choreographed motion was both mesmerizing and beautiful. The darker night would become, the brighter their glow. I would catch them in a mason jar and watch their light gather in an ethereal swirl of movement through the glass. They would ascend, and descend, and ascend again. After setting them free, it would soon be time to go upstairs and fall asleep to the sound of trains breaking through in the distance. I would wake up to sunlight flooding through the windows, the smell of breakfast cooking in the kitchen, and the sound of the wood floors creaking from generations of footsteps that had walked through the hallways. While the glow that filled the nights of the rest of my Generation X childhood would come mostly from video games or TV shows, I never forgot the glow of the fireflies. I never forgot those illuminated mason jars on those Midwestern summer evenings.

Sometimes, now that I am two thousand miles away and thirty something years older, that place and time will call to me and I can feel my heart swelling with some sort of longing. Sometimes a breeze blows into the house and the earth smells exactly like it did on those Illinois nights - rain in the distance falling on farmland, dust being brought down from the atmosphere back to the earth, the hallowed wood of the trees, and the soft, sweet grass. Sometimes, late at night, when an Oregon train goes wailing by in the distance, when I'm half awake, I think for a moment that I am a small child back in Illinois.

If you are Generation X, you were born into one of the most neglected generations in modern history. Thankfully, this doesn't apply to every family, as there are Gen Xers who were well loved in their growing up years - yet while I know Xers who had good childhoods, I know many more who did not. The logic of the times included parental self-immersion which led to, and even required, self-reliance for Xers. The years that Generation X grew up have even been called the most anti-child era in the history of America - and this left Gen X with a pretty hardened edge. The zeitgeist took a wrenching toll on me, and although my childhood was wrought with the same darkness and chaos as most Gen Xers, it was also full of many blessings and good moments that I cling to. Through all my growing-up years, the most meaningful thing of all was a steadfast undertow of light - enough that the darkness could never completely overtake me.

I remember the Illinois dusk. The heavy, tired dusk in those days would hang over the streets, and the houses, and our hearts, foreshadowing a darkness sure to manifest in the coming years and decades. My Great Grandparents' small town had seen a pandemic, and the Great Depression, and poverty, and wars, and the way factory workers have to struggle to feed their families. And history is known to repeat itself. Yet, right in the midst of the enveloping anxiety that came as the sun would slip down below the horizon, a profound peace would emerge. A message would resonate within me, telling me not to be afraid when the dusk comes, and not to be afraid when dusk turns to night, because morning always follows.

I remember the sacred evenings - the sound of the screen door as it tapped against its metal frame, the dusk slowly growing darker. The fireflies would illuminate the glass jar sitting on a red and white checkered tablecloth on a wood table in my Great Grandparent's backyard to mark time, and place, and the meaning of a life and a family. On those summer nights when I would catch the fireflies, I would only keep them in the jar a short time - I wanted most of all to watch them fly again toward the treetops when my Great Grandfather would call out, "Now set them free!" 

If there was a message that Generation X needed to be told in their childhoods, a message we can send back in time to our child-hearts all those years ago, it is this: 

Do not be afraid, because, soon enough, you'll be free.  

If there is a message that Generation X needs to be completely conscious of through the struggles of adulthood, it is this:

Do not be afraid, because the light always ascends. 

Do not be afraid, because the dawn always follows the night.

If there is a message our Great Grandparents, also from a lost generation, would want to send, it is this:

We still have messages for you, come search for them at dusk, and search again at dawn.

As the years went on, when dusk would grow darker and the dark of night would follow, the memory of those glass jars was enough light to sustain me....

Through the darkest of nights, I was given enough light to carry me, and that light was the substance of God. 

Those fleeting moments of unbounded peace and joy stayed imprinted on my consciousness throughout my life - when the fireflies would fly upward, when their light would ascend. While we know that the dusk always leads to night, even the darkest night finally leads once again to the day.


Fireflies at Dusk.

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(c) 2012 images and writing by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved