There’s this picture I took because I felt like the colours of the street pavement formed the shape of a pumpkin. I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to see it – and neither did the girls who apparently looked at me while I was minding my strange photoshoot. It did look like the vegetable, though, with a crooked smile and the uneven, slightly squared eyes you’d see on Halloween.
It was October, so I guess this is fitting.
There are a lot of pictures on my phone, because I like to make memories. I don’t usually remember things well – or never in a way that feels consistent. It’s gotten worse these past years, because I also generally feel like I can never trust my version of certain events, or that they might have been real just because they were real to me. How come I remember the colours and patterns of your shirt, and all irregular words in English, but I never seem to recall quite quickly enough how much seven times eight make? If I close my eyes, I can still taste the salt in the air of the seas I didn’t swim in, and how it felt to walk the uphill street leading to where I lived over a year ago, but there are features I forgot already. Moments I thought would last forever when I lived in them, that ended up blurry and grey in the corner of my mind.
Funnily enough, I rarely look back at the pictures on there. Call it living in the moment or a continuation of my tendencies to be forgetful, it doesn’t really matter that much. Maybe it’s because I keep looking back at them and it reminds me of how much I used to hate myself even when I was really pretty. Maybe it’s because it gives me a reason to hate myself now when I conclude I must not be that beautiful anymore. There aren’t a lot of pictures of me anyway – why focus on myself when I can just immortalise the people I love instead?
The past days have been a collection of me looking up at the ceiling and trying to get myself to remember what my life was like a year ago, how it felt, and who I shared it with. Who I had already lost sight of, and who I missed without even getting to feel any of it because I was too busy. Always so busy. Maybe this is why I feel like I can’t remember half of it now. I swim in this ennui, and these broken memories, and the sensation that the past years have slipped through my fingers in spite of my clenched fists. I look up at my ceiling, and I call them back – and I hope they come back.
Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time taking pictures of the things I’m so scared to forget. Maybe I can’t say I’m living in the moment, after all. I wonder at what moment did my fists clench around the chain I’m dragging around but could so easily let go of. When did I stop trusting that my amygdala isn’t just set on replaying my worst mistakes only – and that my brain can just as easily register the “good”. How much time did I spend in my own head or looking at the world through a camera lens?
On the rare occasions I scroll through the galleries of pictures in my phone, I wonder if anyone realised that I might not even have been there at all. There’s a strange bitterness to thinking you might not have enjoyed something enough while it lasted. Maybe this is also part of the reason why I rarely look back at the pictures on here.
If you read anything about me, you wouldn’t be surprised that I tend to approach life as if I could prevent its worst outcomes – and that I hence might have successfully prevented it from happening to me until now. Still, it might be that I haven’t quite felt like my own person in a long time, and that the girl who took all of these pictures feels like she’s miles away, but I can see now that all she did was thinking of me. Fingers wrapped around a camera to make sure I can write about all of these places I feel like I don’t even remember today – because it doesn’t really matter if I do. These places are real, and I was there, and there was the shape of a pumpkin in the middle of that street, and that girl looked out for me and my bad memory.
Maybe I’m floating in the in-between moment that isn’t quite here, nor then, and maybe she’s stuck in a space that always whispers later instead of now. But understand if she still takes so many pictures of the things she’s so scared to forget. Maybe it isn’t always a way to avoid living in the moment. Maybe I just try to make it last a little longer before it slips away – even if I might never look back again.
Maybe love is the places I can’t remember but took the time to photograph. Maybe it isn’t that at all.
“I’m making memories.”
andstillwedream 