forgotten film

december 2018-

This one doesn’t have too many pictures, so it probably won’t be too long. This post took me a very, very long time to write. I wrote things down, came back a week later, deleted and rewrote them, and repeated that cycle for about a month and a half. There were a lot of things that I wanted to say but realized that there’s a better place and time (aka a better blog post) for those thoughts, so at least you have that to look forward to!

I got my first two disposable cameras the summer of 2017 and lost one of them. I started taking pictures on it in September 2018, lost it, and continued shooting in May 2019 when I found it again. When I finished the roll I begged my mom to take me to Walgreens so I could get it developed immediately. I had absolutely NO idea what was on the camera and that was so exciting! It was like a little gift from my past self. There is something special about that type of forgotten film. A lot of the pictures were just of random people or of my dogs, but a couple of them had some stories behind them.

december 20 2018

If you can’t tell by the way that I’m smiling with my whole entire body, I was quite ecstatic in this moment. Every year, my friends and I do a Secret Santa gift exchange Christmas party little thing on the last day of school before winter break. Usually the gifts consist of varieties of lotions, perfumes, makeup, or some sort of joke gift. This girl put some THOUGHT into my gift. So, a little backstory. I don’t think there is a strong enough word for how I felt about timothee chalamet, armie hammer, or really just call me by your name in general. I am still timothee’s biggest fan and cannot listen to “mystery of love” without tearing up, but I can say I’m back to, like, being a normal person. I don’t even know how to describe the sheer intensity of this phase I went through. I don’t think anyone can. So when it got to my turn to open my present and my friend (shoutout megan, you’re a real one) starts off by saying “So… you know how you really love that one guy timothee and that one book…” Let me tell you. I got … emotional? Started crying? Like girl, get it together, this is embarrassing for us. Anyways, she got me a SIGNED SCRIPT OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. Signed by timothee, armie, and the director luca. For anyone who has ever been a fan of anything, you know how exciting it is to get some sort of memorabilia, and how extra exciting it is to get something SIGNED. It’s exciting for anyone, but as my uncle says, anything will send me into “an emotional tizzy.” The script hadn’t been delivered when she left for school but I made her track the shipment and sure enough … it got delivered like 5 minutes later. SO at this point I would do anything to go get that script. I was willing to walk to her house or pay her to drive me or hitchhike or have someone go break in and get it from her mailbox, ya know, just regular stuff. but megan was like “chill, we can just go get it real quick.” gotta love her, she really keeps me grounded. So we left the party to go get this script and the whole way there i’m going back and forth between screaming and thanking her as if she had just saved my life or something. We pull up and I hop out of her jeep, barefoot, in december, on a road that had to be made of like rocks and glass, and popped that mailbox open so fast. Target acquired. Naturally, I had to do a photoshoot with my new and also only prized possession. I immediately sent a picture of it into my family group chat and sent a separate picture to my uncle, then posted a picture of it on my story, then DMed it to some people, then sent it into every snap group chat I could think of. THE WORLD HAD TO KNOW! Megan, if you’re reading this, thank you for sending me into an emotional tizzy on that fine december afternoon.

december 30 2018

This one’s a little darker. I could go into a deep and ranting explanation about these photos and bring up the topic of the stigma around mental illness, but I think I should probably just save it for a whole separate post. So there’s this bridge that is super meaningful to me for a couple reasons, most of them sad. My friend Kalley and I try to visit this bridge every once in a while. We’ve only been a couple times, both in the dead of winter and the dead of summer, and we can only stay for a little bit because the temps are just too extreme like we should really plan better but oh well, gotta love that midwest climate. Anyways, the bridge is pretty far from my house and it’s basically in the middle of nowhere. The drive out there is really pretty no matter what the weather is. Every time we go, the weather seems to change from just like, bleh, to really nice. For instance, in the winter, the sky could be gray all day, but as soon as we get there, the clouds open up and give us the best sunset we’d seen in months. Or in the summer, it’ll be raining for days but then the sun comes out and the sky clears up and all of a sudden there’s not a cloud in sight. There’s a small stream always trickling and a warm breeze that makes the leaves of the trees shake, which by the way is the most soothing sound in the world. Kalley and I just stand on the bridge in silence and walk around and just look and take it all in, all of the signs that we’re being given by nature. It’s hard to understand without the backstory, but basically all I am saying is that our experiences at this particular bridge are reminders that people are okay and that life is better than it may seem when you are caught up in a heavy moment.

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