It Is On A Videotape Somewhere

There was a camcorder. Her uncle had it, and he filmed everything with it for about four years, and everything he filmed has the same slightly green cast and a date stamp in the corner that was never set correctly and reads a year that is wrong for all of it.

He filmed it. She knows he filmed it, because there is a photograph, taken by somebody else, of her uncle filming it, which is one of the funnier objects in her life.

The tape went into a cardboard box with about thirty others, labeled in his handwriting, and the box lived in the understairs cupboard of a house that was sold when his marriage ended. The tapes went with him to a flat. The flat was small. At some point in a clear-out, he says, most of them went, and he is not certain which, and he is very sorry, and he genuinely is, and he has apologized for it three separate times over eleven years in a way that makes her wish she had never brought it up.

He might still have some. He does not know where. The player went to the tip in 2009.

So it exists, probably, in the sense that a physical object may be in a box in a loft in a flat in another town, and it does not exist in the sense that no living person can watch it.

She was twelve.

That is the thing that makes the tape matter more than it should. She was twelve and it was a strange, sad, complicated year in her family for reasons that are not this story, and her memory of that whole twelve months is unreliable in a way she has had to accept about herself. She remembers her own twelfth year the way you remember a house you were in once.

So the tape was going to be the record. Not of what happened, which she can more or less recall, but of her. What her face was doing. Whether she looked like a girl who meant it or a girl who was going along with a family that had a lot going on.

And it is in a box, in a loft, in another town, and there is no player.

She is thirty-nine. She has made her peace with most of that year. This one thing has stayed open, and it stays open in a specific way: not as grief, but as an unverifiable claim about herself.

The archive is somewhere else

I want to say something first about what you were actually looking for on that tape, because I think naming it correctly is most of the work.

You were not looking for evidence that it happened. You know it happened. Your uncle filmed it and there is a photograph of him filming it and nobody has ever disputed a fact in the whole account.

You were looking for a twelve-year-old's face.

Specifically, you wanted to see whether she meant it, because you cannot remember, because that year is a house you were in once. And you have been carrying an unverifiable claim about your own interior at twelve, and a person who cannot verify a claim about themselves tends to quietly downgrade it, and that downgrade has been running for twenty-seven years.

Here is what I want to put in place of the tape.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Look at how strange and how physical that is. God is described as keeping a bottle of somebody's tears. Not a summary. Not a total. The actual thing, kept.

And the last line is a question that expects yes. Are they not in thy book? David is not asking whether God noticed. He is stating, in the form of a question, that the record exists and is held.

You are recorded in a book you cannot open and have never needed to, and that is not a comfort I am offering a woman with a technology problem, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in the open place rather than the informed one.

Now let me say something about your twelfth year, carefully, because it was a hard one and I am not going to trample it.

That year is unreliable in you for good reasons. A mind under load does not file well, and yours was under load, and the patchiness is not a defect in you. It is the ordinary cost of being twelve in a house with a great deal going on.

You were not absent from your own life that year, however little of it you can retrieve, and Scripture says God tells our wanderings, which is a word for the parts of a life that do not look like progress, and the Spirit of God was in that house the entire year whether or not anybody in it had the capacity to notice.

I want to touch your uncle, too, and the three apologies.

You wish you had never brought it up. He is a man who filmed his family for four years, which is a kindness, and who lost most of it in a clear-out during the worst period of his life, which is a sadness, and who has apologized three times, which is more than most people manage.

You are allowed to release him entirely, and you do not need his loft searched, and the word of God does not put your standing anywhere near a cardboard box in another town. Nothing in the written word puts your standing in a cardboard box, and the Holy Spirit who was in that twelve-year-old is in the woman reading this.

And here is the last thing, and it is the one for the woman who wanted to see a face.

You have been asking a tape to tell you what only God can see, and He has seen it the whole time. He was not watching that day through a lens with a green cast and a wrong date stamp. He was inside the twelve-year-old, and the word says the record is in His book, and the Spirit inside you now is the same Spirit who was there, and He has never once needed a player.