I carried a digital camera everywhere starting in around 2002, and have tens of thousands of photos from the last two decades from WAYYYY before everybody carried a camera everywhere with them all the time.
I didn't realize that the Photos app had loaded all of my old photos onto my laptop until it popped up a "New memory for you from 2012!"
In October of 2011, I went to Los Angeles with my friend Alex, attended a play put on by Mark Z. Danielewski, and wound up getting to have brunch with him. We explored the city by way of House of Leaves, visiting locations from the book and feeling a great many things.
I was in the long drawn out process of breaking up with one of the great loves of my life, who I maintained a level of friendship with until last year when I finally pissed her off enough by being too depressed and literally broke to make it to an event. I was just reconnecting with the next big love of my life; that was messy for a while. The two of them work together now, and neither one likes me very much. I was a pain in the ass!!!!!! I had no idea what I was doing, except trying to do my best and be as sweet and thoughtful as I could be. It fucks me up to see pictures of the past, when the feelings those moments held have never really gone away.
The pictures show me that I'd just met Jace, that Tony was back in town visiting, that I had just moved into the apartment complex where I worked and began that strange stretch of my life. That Mimestein, my sweet first cat, was still alive but didn't live with me anymore. That I had just gotten the glasses I still have now, 8 years later, because I haven't had vision insurance in almost a decade. I just got some this month; if I can figure out that it's safe to go to an optometrist, I'm going to get ten new pairs of glasses to make up for it.
My pictures show me too much. It's almost impossible for me to enjoy my memories after 2004; I stumbled forward from thing to thing, a dazed creature, slowly losing the innocence I had unfortunately retained for so long, that I still retain too much of, but which shifts in and out like a mirage.
The worst thing they show me is that I used to care about my day to day life in a particular way that I don't now, which was to take pictures of things before pictures were ubiquitous, to see and want to capture the people and places I loved, to translate my lived experience into art and song in a way I rarely do anymore. I have become more skilled, more efficient, more valuable, and overall a better person; but it scours a deep canyon of sharp regret to look directly at the things I lost mostly because I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and was reconstructing myself after a pretty commonly fucked up conservative childhood and the dead star gravity collapse of my last year in high school.
Jacob's recital. My blood approves. Impossible breakfasts. Book from Noam. Mugs I don't own. Four Eyes first show. Shitty little desk. Jurassic technology. Dandelion finger. Essays not yet defeated. Marketing reform. Floral exploration. Literally too much for my trauma-stunted depression-addled mind to handle, and yet it kept moving, calamitously, beautifully, and I guess it's normal enough for things to end. But I never wanted what happened to end. I was just so afraid. And I'm so sorry to everyone I wasn't coherent enough to hold on to.
Everything I ever went for, I treasure. The losses sustained through fear of following through or of disrupting what was a pretty pathetic status quo are things I really can't bear to even hold in my mind for long enough to reconcile.
