Photo Graveyard

Photos are scattered across my living room floor. Piles, slightly askew, marking different places in my life- be they time or geography. Me with straight hair smiling and scar-less. Me as a toddler, chubby legs and the same fat cheeks. Me in South Africa, wasted down to bone after my car accident. 

Me post-accident, in Swaziland

I pulled them all out with the hopes of bringing order to the chaos. For years my mother has tried to coax me into making scrapbooks. She bought one for my high school graduation, I bought one when I returned from the Peace Corps. They both have strong beginning, they have pictures and journal entries pasted inside. But a few pages in, and the glue stopped, there are photos slipped between the pages with a hint of my intentions. And then at the end it all tapers off…first to a page filled with photographs without a common theme or message and then no photographs at all. 

I grow bored. I become irritated, limited by my horrendous handwriting and too lazy to transcribe everything to the computer so it can be printed neatly. So the books sit on shelves, a half memory of a time long ago.

My mother encouraged the scrapbooks because she understood I wouldn’t remember things forever. I scoffed to myself, how could I forget such important events. But important as they were, they have been crowded out by so many other things. Other events, other cities, other people. Hell, some of it was knocked clean out of my head from an accident – some blotted by a desire to forget.

My high school bestie

I pulled out the photos on my floor the day, and traveled back for a moment, into the space of the places that are captured in those glossy squares. The ones I remember clearly. The ones that hit me roundly in my nostalgia. Sitting with my head on the shoulder of my best friend in high school. We spent so many hours on that couch. More hours talking…about what…we have no idea now. 

There is a photo of me dangling by a bungee cord over the Zambezi River.  I remember the exhilaration of actually jumping off a bridge- ignoring every survival instinct in my body and hurtling myself, arms spread like wings, toward the horizon. I remember the exhilaration morphing to pain as the cord settled and I dangled from my ankles while I waited for them to pull me to safety. And of course I remember the Egyptian man who told me, as I walked back to the starting point on the bridge, “you have the most magnificent scream.” And I did.

There are so many photos, my first boyfriend hugging me close at New Year’s, 10 years after our first kiss, my college friends, my Peace Corps ones. My family. 

Staring at them I understand and don’t, why we take them. I love the moment of love and joy and even the tinge of sadness that is embedded in each one. The memories that shock me back in time and then propel me back to exactly where I am, sitting on my couch flipping through pictures.

I don’t know what to do with them all.

Arranging them into books feels so strange. I heard an article on NPR a few months ago that talked about how in a recent year we took more photos than had been taken in all of the years before. All of them. 

My grandparents, back when folks dressed for photos

We used to arrange our photos into books because they were select and special. We arranged them because they were, if not quite few, at least precious. A smattering of baby photos, some family shots on vacation.

Now I have pictures of a friend sitting on the beach, a bunch filled with sand dunes (trying to get the perfect angle), one of friends piled on a single chair for no particular reason at all. 

I can’t imagine who will look through these. I can’t imagine they will be cherished like the two black and white photos I have in frames of my grandparents. Pictures taken back when folks dressed for the occasion. Or like the school picture I have of my father when he was 14. We have so many pictures to choose from how will any of them stand out as special?

Partly I feel lazy. Some images I have seared into my heart, never to be forgotten even years later. There is no picture of me saying goodbye to Ess at the airport. But I can see it so clearly. Too clearly, it hurt so badly I can recall not just the image but the pain itself. Palpable. No camera was necessary.

But you can’t share a memory the way you can share a picture. The exactitude is lost in a sea of metaphors in speech and the pieces of the moment we tuck away and reserve just for ourselves. Photographs tell a seemingly whole story- even if it isn’t always complete. 

The reality is these photos will go back into a box. A little more orderly. Possibly with some notations of dates or geography, but back into the box where they belong.