Polaroids of the Past

There's a hidden folder at the bottom of my Pinterest page where I keep old pictures of myself with people from my past. I haven't spoken to them in years but I can't bring myself to throw away the last shred of evidence that we were once close, that we used to be integral parts in each other's lives. The girls in the photos smile and laugh, hugging each other and ignoring the fact that ten minutes before the photo was taken, insults were being thrown and rebuttals swallowed whole, leaving a lump in the throat of the sad girl who had started to realize that it was becoming harder and harder to keep the lump from turning into audible words. It was becoming harder and harder to swallow the hurtful things being thrown at her, like a fistful of pills consumed dry.

I take pictures of everything and everyone I grow close with and print them out, arranging them in chronological order in the photo albums that collect dust on my bookshelf. These pictures are meant to bring back happy memories as opposed to the ones hidden in the online folder, but sometimes they elicit a surprising melancholy strong enough to warp the pictures, framing them as a sad memory because it's just that: a memory, no longer part of the present, instead of framing them as a happy memory because they captured a happy moment from the past. The people in these photos did no harm, but in fact helped build and sculpt me into the person I am today, and I love them for that. Many of us from these frozen moments in time just grew apart. Only some of them have stayed, promising pictures together in the future.

There's a wall of family photos in my parents' house. Inside each frame sit a mix of family members I never got the chance to meet and people I've known my whole life. Some of the pictures hide their age well, others are yellowed and blurry. Either way, all of them bring a comfort that only photos hanging crooked in a warm childhood home can do. Too many of them feature a little girl who hadn't gotten her freckles or curly hair yet, a girl who had thick bangs and a weird, mischievous grin that made it look like she was planning something. The little girl liked to wear dress-up clothes out in public, and her wonderful mother let her do it because she knew it made her happy -she also knew that the little girl would throw a fit if she wasn't allowed to wear her plastic princess heels to story time at the library, so it was probably best to just let her look a little silly. This little girl was happy, for the most part. She was physically and emotionally unaffected by the sometimes sad and scary world around her, because her age allowed her to be so. Did that little girl disappear forever, or am I just a distorted version of her?

I take too many pictures and forget to delete the duplicates. I'm picky with the ones I do end up deleting, and usually they're just screenshots of things I want on Amazon, or a book I found at the bookstore that I wanted to buy but couldn't during that trip. I very rarely delete pictures when there's other people in them with me, or even if they're the only people in the frame. I'm so scared of losing people and that fear manifests itself in my photos. I've become a memory hoarder.