They gave it to me in a box, which was unprecedented. Back then, I was so used to having my pictures come in bright yellow envelops so it was...strange, almost, to grasp a year of my life in a well-weighted cardboard box. An hour or so after attempting to find the just-right backgrounds for my project, I returned home and attempted to start my latest habit: scrapbooking.
I was intent on spending the rest of the day just working on this project, but after an hour or so, I found myself being pretty exhausted. For a bit, I thought it was because I'd been straining my neck by poring over these photos and scissors and embellishments. It didn't take long, though, for me to realize that I was actually (hold the gagging) emotionally exhausted.
Reliving the moments encased in gloss was tiring. But in a good way. Every photo tells a story...and going through even a single month's worth of photos was like mentally taking in two novels in a span of 1.5 minutes. Take the following for instance:
Sure, it's just a picture of my feet in water. But what it says to me is, "Remember when Katrina hit? When every report said it was above a Category 4 just off our coast and that it'd get even faster and worse when it reached the mainland? How crazy was it that it came and barely brushed us...only to destroy New Orleans as it traveled north? Do you remember how the entire neighborhood got flooded? How the water came calf-high, but that it used to be worse in the past years? Do you remember that that was the weekend the Video Music Awards were in town and everyone in the academy got to go and stand in the crowd? It was a constant, torrential downpour every rehearsal, but everyone still came because, shit, the VMfrigginAs were in town and everyone's too stubborn to miss being just a little closer celebrities than the TV. Remember that that was the weekend Shay got sick and had to miss the show, and her mother called everyone and asked if we had food poisoning...only to find out that she'd had appendicitis. Or that Rae was in such a rush to run downstairs to catch a ride to the rehearsals that she knocked over a chair and ended up shattering her jade bracelet? Or that Damen got annoyed at the end of the show, that one of our other classmates had the seat-reservation sign for one of his favorite bands (was it All American Rejects or Green Day?) and wouldn't stop pouting until he got it?
...It's been like that all day. I managed to get through the first 3 months of my senior year, but that's a shitload of photos with an exponential harddrive of memories alone that I'm glad I took a break. I'll keep at it again, probably before I go to sleep. But it's fun...reliving all this. I'm scared to look at the later ones...but these, the photos of the happy times, they're nice to remind myself of the good 'ol days before real life set in.
...Then again, I was pretty chunky back then, so I guess it wasn't so bad to move on from then.
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