My birthday was a couple days ago. 

July nineteenth. Kels gifted me a Polaroid camera. It came in a box with two types of film: black-and-white and color. 

Every polaroid picture is special, I think, because it’s unique, one-of-a-kind. And pure: one take, one print. Taking twelve pictures on your iPhone and posting the best one feels, somehow, less pure. 

But a polaroid is impossible to contrive.

“Eddie—”

I look up from my chair. A flash goes off. 

“Nice,” I say. 

“I guess we’ll see,” Kels says, putting the picture in a cabinet to develop in the dark. 

She walks away. I’m still sitting, holding Beau, watching him chug his bottle. He’s scarfing it down, ravenous, like there’s no tomorrow. Serious eating. I slow him down: I pull the bottle out of his mouth and tell him to chill, dude, chill, until he gives me a look and I give him back the milk. This happens every few minutes until he’s done, until he sits up, stunned and sweaty, satisfied.

“Good job,” I say, patting his back. “Well done.”

When he was just born, Beau’s pediatrician told us we could begin weaning him off the bottle after he turns a year old. A year felt so far away then. Now he’s eleven months old! His birthday party is next month. The invitations went out last week: a forest-green card with a lion cub cartoon. It says “Wild One” because he’s turning one. 

He is turning one. 

“Aw,” Kels says, holding the picture. She closes the cabinet. “I love it.”

She shows me. “I love it, too,” I say. 

Every polaroid picture is special because it’s unique, just like the moment it’s preserved. 

Do you have a polaroid picture somewhere? 

Dig it up. Any picture will do. Dig it up and write it — “write the picture” — by giving it context, by animating the subjects, by showing us what they’re doing and saying.

This is an excellent storytelling exercise. Great practice. I do it often. 

You can “write a picture” using as many words as you like. Or you can use an exact word count, which makes the exercise more challenging. Either way’s fine.

And feel free to reference this article as an example.

I gave myself exactly 400 words to write this picture of me and my son, doing something precious together, something finite: