I'm visiting family this week and my mom is going through decades of family photos to prepare a book for my uncle who has a big birthday coming up in about a month. Of course she's also become sidetracked by baby photos and pictures of her own childhood. Today she asked me to pick up some film she'd dropped off (yes, believe it or not, some people still use film and apparently Walgreens still develops it) from some cameras she'd found in a drawer. I came home and dropped the envelopes of photos on the table and went on about my afternoon. Then later on, while most of the family was outside for a in impromptu BBQ, I went into the kitchen to get something to drink and noticed the envelopes were still unopened on the counter. So I sat down and started to go through them, expecting to see pictures from some family wedding or child's birthday party. Instead, I saw pictures from my sophomore year in college. Talk about your mixed emotions.
My sophomore year of college seems so long ago, like a lifetime ago really. But in reality it was less than a decade ago. And it was probably the last time I was genuinely, 1000% happy and unaffected by the worst of my habits. It wasn't so much the pictures of me or my friends that brought up the bittersweet feelings. It was more the dozens of pictures of my first love and me. I have rarely looked at pictures of her since she left almost nine years ago, never mind looking at pictures of the two of us together in much happier times. It was only about six months ago that I was able to put up a small picture of her in an out of the way place, which is progress but I've never really gone out of my way to look at it. I've never felt ready to look at those pictures and relive that time in my life. Yet I couldn't stop flipping through these pictures, it was almost as if some force was guiding me through them. And I felt...Well, I don't know how to finish that sentence. It was almost as if I was completely detached from that period of my life, like I was looking at pictures of someone else.
I can't say I'm not still reeling a little from seeing those pictures. It didn't bother me to see her face or see us back when there was an us. I don't know 'bothered' is the right word for how I feel. I guess I feel sad about what was and what could've been. I feel puzzled about how a person ca change so drastically in the course of a decade. Then I feel upset with myself for being puzzled cuz a near-death experience will change anybody. But for the first time in a very long time, I felt happy about the time we spent together. But also sad because I remembered the pictures were taken less than a month before everything changed. And it amazes me how the two people in those pictures had absolutely no clue what was waiting in the wings. They had dreams and plans and rituals and habits. All of that is gone now and has been for quite some time. Which is unfortunate. But also how it was always meant to be I suppose.
