This Here Giraffe.

Its slender tongue tentatively touched my offering. It was the colour of chewed-up blueberry bubblegum stuck to the underside of a chair. It tugged at the teal green leaves of my offering. I squealed and dropped the branch, scared that it would reach forward and eat my hands.

He had propped me up on his shoulder so that I was as tall as the metal enclosure and almost as tall as the giraffes. I was the tallest girl on earth – giddy with thrill and giddy with fear that I would fall head first into the ground. But his strong hands held me in place, long before the years would turn them callous and dry. I had believed for the longest time that he was the strongest man on earth, that it would mean that I was safe whenever he was around. I would look beside me and see her delicate face framed by swathes of cool white cotton hiding the mass of ebony underneath. She wore that red lipstick then. She only wore one shade. She was our Snow White: the fairest woman on earth. With her, anywhere we went we were home. We were happy. We were the happiest family on earth.

The photographs were all that remained from that day now speckled with green and grey mould, eating away at the edges. I was three and it was our first visit to the zoo – just the three of us. The photographs lie safely in the dark tucked away inside a box, inside our closet, like relics of another life – as though they belonged to someone else. Perhaps it did.

I may have pieced the memory from bits of old photographs, painted the cracks and scraped away the mould. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe it did happen. I don’t know the difference. I don’t think it matters. All that matters is that there’s some truth to it. it’s enough to keep. It’s just enough to believe that maybe we were still the same people. Just a different photograph.