I looked through my old photos and found myself smiling unconsciously while I scrolled through past them. Old memories resurfaced in my mind. Feelings that I’ve tried so hard to bury were felt once more. A long time has passed. It baffled me how I was smiling at a photo that used to trigger pain and heartbreak. But now, all that remained were the laughter, love, and friendship that I had with them. A lot of things have changed. We are not those people in the photographs anymore. Those people, including me, were kids that were still trying to figure their place in this world. Now, we are still trying to figure things out but we are more equipped with experience and toughness that the past years of ups and downs have given us. We have grown. I have grown. I would like to believe so. It was amusing to see how much adventures I had. Adventures that took me to places that I never thought I’d ever get the chance to go to, both with friends and alone. I’m glad I said yes to those adventures. I have no regrets. The only regret I have right now is not saying yes to experience more because I wasn’t brave enough.
Now, we live in a time when these kinds of photographs only make us wish a little bit harder that we could go back to those times again, when we were free to go out, free to be with friends and loved ones, to feel them so close to us, to kiss their cheek and hug them instead of just saying, “I love you and I appreciate you”, because we weren’t good in articulating our feelings. We may hate to admit it but we wish we could have done so much more with our time and freedom. We wish we could have gone to more places, to have given more time to visit family and friends, and to spend more time with them.
Who would think that all of that could ever be taken away or a day would come that social interactions are limited and possibly dangerous? We can’t really do anything about it now, can we? We can’t really fully go back to a time before all this?
Regardless, it comforts me to have these photographs that can remind me of the times when I felt alive; it’s not everyday that I do. And when I decide to look at them again, I guess, it would feel like reaching into something and somewhere so far away, that when I would close my hand to try and grab it, I wouldn’t be able to hold it, like water slipping through my fingers.
It’s not here anymore.
But it doesn’t mean it was never there.
-k
AT EVENTIDE 