Ronabelle looked at the screen. A perfect photo. Everyone was smiling, sunlight pouring in through the windows, even the decorations behind them caught in sharp detail.
Then one of her classmates looked around, confused.
“Wait… what are we doing here?”
Ronabelle laughed. “What do you mean?”
He scratched his head. “I don’t know. I forgot why I was even smiling.”
That was the first time it happened.
At first, Ronabelle thought it was nothing. Just a weird moment. But then it happened again. And again.
Every time Ronabelle took a photo, the person in it would forget the moment captured in the photograph. A joke shared. A hug. A surprise visit. They would look at the photo and smile, but they couldn’t remember how they got there or why they had been so happy.
Ronabelle was always the only one who remembered.
Her best friend forgot the entire school fair. Even teachers looked confused after she took class photos, as if they weren’t sure what had just happened.
Only the photos remained. Evidence that something real had happened, even if the people in them no longer remembered.
It creeped Ronabelle out. The way people forgot. The way no one else noticed. The way only the photos remembered.
She didn’t know if the camera was broken, cursed, or something worse. All she knew was that she didn’t want to hold onto it anymore.
She carried it one last time, planning to throw it away.
That’s when she noticed a classmate crying alone in the hallway.
Light from the window spilled across the corridor, turning the empty space into something quiet and heavy. The way the girl sat there, small against the wide wall and silence, made the whole moment look like a photograph waiting to be taken.
Ronabelle wasn’t planning to help.
She just felt the urge to capture it. One last photo of something raw and real.
Click.
A few seconds later, the classmate stopped crying.
She looked around, then broke into a big smile.
“Hi, Ronabelle. What’s up?” she said, like nothing had happened.
Ronabelle stared at her.
Then she understood.
The camera wasn’t erasing memories at random.
It was taking away the emotional pain held in the moment it captured.
The girl had forgotten the sadness, but the photograph remained. The camera erased the memory, not the evidence.
For the first time, Ronabelle wondered if the camera had never been a curse at all.
Maybe it was a strange kind of mercy.
So she used it.
She took photos of heartbreak, regret, grief, and moments people wished they could leave behind. One snapshot at a time.
She helped people let go of pain, even if they never knew she had done it.
And Ronabelle remembered everything.
Maybe that was another side of photography. Not just keeping memories, but sometimes freeing people from the ones that hurt.
On August 19, World Photography Day, Ronabelle raised her camera once more.
Snap.
⌨ ᴛʸᵖⁱⁿᵍ ᴏᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ʙˡᵘᵉ ᵈᵃʳᵉᵐ ᵐᵘˢⁱᶜ ᵇˡᵒᵍ