People take photos for memories, to one day look back at picture perfect smiles, hoping to extract a comforting sense of the good old days. In this way, people’s photographs get sucked dry and simply become pieces of paper or once thoughtfully purchased polaroid film.
Memories should not live in photos.
Photos are a poor medium to house what should be living sentiments and moments that move with you, not remain closed away in a dusty photo album in the third row of your bookshelf.
My memories live with me, a living quilt of happiness with cross-stitches of hurt, blanketing me from the moment I lazily rub my eyes awake to the moment I willfully shut them.
I like photographs too, but I don’t give them the power of memory.
To me, there are countless other versions of myself, of both the once and still cherished people of my life and lives past. They are the versions that only exist in that one particular polaroid or ebony framed portrait. In that way, I know I have had thousands of friends, family, thousands of versions of myself that have been and will be.
This is the only way I can see photographs.
This is the only way I can remind myself, in soul-sinking times, that I have never been alone and never will be.
That I have new chapters waiting in the future, many more than those I have already written.
I do not give the photos power, but they lend to me a unique power all my own: the power to continue to move forward with strength, to create new versions of myself that will always be remembered by the living one, to allow myself to meet new versions of cherished people in my life.
No matter the corners, dead-ends I may encounter, I know I will never fold, never bend.
Because I know, and will never forget:
I am me: a fleshed out, 3D tower of living memory.
But I am not paper.
And I am certainly not a photograph.
– Pihu J.