In every photo of me until I turned six, my face was always marked—lines and streaks that blurred my smile or scratched out my eyes. Whenever I asked about it, my parents would laugh it off and say, “Printers weren’t that great back then.” I believed them. I had no reason not to.
That changed last weekend.
I was visiting my Aunt Margaret, my father’s younger sister, who lives in the same house she grew up in. We were sitting in her cozy living room, drinking chamomile tea, when she mentioned an old photo album she wanted to show me. “You were such a sweet little thing,” she smiled, standing up slowly. “You were always laughing, even when chaos was happening around you.”
She returned with a heavy brown album, its leather cover cracked from age. As she opened it, a faint smell of dust and old paper floated up. The photos were mostly family gatherings from the early ’90s—smiling cousins, backyard barbecues, Christmas trees surrounded by torn wrapping paper. The first few pages were normal.
And then I saw one of myself, no older than four.
My face was marked with those same thin, jagged lines I remembered. Except this time, the photo wasn’t a reprint. It was an original—glossy, intact, well-preserved. And the scratches weren’t a printing error. They were deliberate. Etched deep into the photo with something sharp, like a needle or a pin.
I froze, flipping to the next one. Same thing. Another photo of me, laughing on a picnic blanket, with three deep gouges across my face. Again and again—every image of me under the age of six had been vandalized. Some more violently than others.
“Who did this?” I asked, my voice thin.
My aunt looked up slowly. She hadn’t realized what I was staring at. When she saw the photos, her smile disappeared.
“I thought they’d all been destroyed,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
She hesitated, fingers trembling slightly as she reached to close the album. But I stopped her.
“Aunt Margaret… What’s going on?”
She looked at me for a long time before speaking, her voice low.
“When you were born, your parents were struggling… not just financially, but emotionally. Your mother had gone through something… something dark. Postpartum depression, they said. But it was worse than that. She became paranoid. She started saying things—claiming someone else was pretending to be her child. That you weren’t really hers.”
I stared at her, stunned.
“She’d take the photos of you, sit alone for hours, and then… scratch your face out of them. She said it was to ‘protect herself.’ That if she didn’t mark the images, the ‘other one’ would come for her.”
My mouth went dry. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Your father thought you were too young to understand. And after… well, after she got better, they wanted to bury that part of the past.”
“Got better?” I repeated.
“She was hospitalized when you were six. That’s why it stopped. They told you she went on a long vacation to ‘rest.’ When she came back, she was stable. She never hurt you, physically. But those years… they were difficult.”
I looked down at the photo again. A tiny version of myself, beaming at the camera. Oblivious. Happy.
A face someone wanted to erase.
“Why didn’t Dad throw these away?” I asked quietly.
“He tried,” she said. “But I kept some. I don’t know why. Maybe to remind myself of how close we came to losing both of you.”
A silence settled between us, heavy with memories and words unspoken. I flipped through the rest of the album slowly. My scratched face appeared over and over, like a ghost haunting its own reflection.
“She loved you, you know,” Aunt Margaret said finally. “Even in her worst moments. She just couldn’t trust what was real anymore.”
I closed the album.
That night, I called my dad. I didn’t ask him directly—I simply said, “I found some old pictures at Aunt Margaret’s today.” There was a pause on the other end. And then, a sigh.
“Guess you know now,” he said quietly. “We wanted to protect you from it. From her illness. She didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I understand,” I replied. And for the first time, I think I did.
The next morning, I went to the attic of my own home and found an old box labeled “Childhood – Photos.” I opened it with care. Inside were copies of those same photos—but all of them had been reprinted, glossy and clean. No scratches. No lines. Just a little boy smiling back at the camera.
But now I knew the truth behind the missing faces.
I gently placed Aunt Margaret’s album beside mine. The contrast between the two was haunting—one set carefully cleaned, the other scarred and raw.
I didn’t throw either away.
Because both were real.
And sometimes, the truth isn’t about what’s in the picture—it’s about the story behind the frame.