I cannot hold my memories
I notice something: I cannot hold my memories.
Well, that is an exaggeration. But I like a little drama.
I read Tuesday’s Snail Mail where she talks about some of the physical mail she received from many people throughout her life and her postcard collection. My first thought was, I want to do that too!”. My second thought was, “Do I have even one physical photo with my friends?”.
I had this idea in the past to choose our best pics and have them printed in Polaroids, but in the end we never did. What a pity, I probably will bring it up again.
When I was like twelve, my dad lost his phone in a bus terminal, and gone were most of the pictures my parents had of my baby sister. It was that period of time when most people would rather have phones (with awful quality) than cameras, but cloud services and automatic uploading were not common yet (especially to people with low income and barely any tech knowledge).
In my case I have dozens of photos, my parents had cameras at the time, the kind with film, and they revealed my baby pics. I have some in my bookshelf (like my dad giving me a bath and him helping me feed a baby cow). Most of my sister's childhood photos came from different members of the family who found one with/of her from some event long ago.
I’m afraid I'm going to lose my memories. I cannot hold data.
I’m one lost password, one robbery, or one dead phone away from losing these precious memories.
Moreover, having a camera in our phones made taking pictures easier, but also a little meaningless. You see, pictures tended to be something special. You had to be selective, somebody needed to take it for you (there was a time selfies were a new and popular thing, can you believe it? ). Nowadays we take pictures of everything: our food, cool rocks, strangers, ourselves, weird shaped stains, menus, cute dogs, cats, and so much more.
It's as natural as breathing. So natural we take at least one a day. And under all the daily ones are the special ones, the ones that hold meaning, a moment we don’t want to forget. But they are buried, and at least I am too lazy to dig for them.
All of this is to say I'm going to collect more memories. Write more letters, find and send some postcards, print my favorite photos, and ask my friends to do the same. I have some little things, post-its and half pages from my time in high school, crocheted things my friend gifted me, a keychain from another friend's hometown that didn’t quite survive my purse, a plastic goblet from a picnic I didn’t throw away and painted little flowers in it, and a glass full of seashells from the last time we went to the beach.
Ten years in the future I want to be able to hold all those things. To point to portraits and tell stories of my friends. To show souvenirs from places I have been. To be able to hold all those memories.
Wow, this was long, got a little carried away.
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