black hole sun

On my way to work. When I'm pretending to listen to some patient's inane prattle about their lives. When I'm scanning. When I'm scheduling. When I drive home. When I watch Grey's Anatomy. I write all the time. Which would be really great, if I could actually get it all down.

But I get to this page, and...nothing.

Of course, I have a secret blog. Where all of my dirty secrets are. Where I write things I'm ashamed of. Where I write very embarrassing things to people who will never know said embarrassing things. I've been needing to load that blog up with some things. Especially lately. But I'm terrified to go near it. Because there are things in that blog I don't want to remember, and that I can't delete.

I've been taking pictures since 2001. Both of my grandparents were photographers-one had his own shop in our hometown for as long as I could remember. The first picture that started my collection was of my friend James Thomas, standing in front of the school buses at my old high school. The resolution was probably 5mp at best, but I guarded that plastic piece of shit camera like it was a top of the line Canon. And once I started, I couldn't stop. Seventeen years later and I've got almost 90,000 of them. My friends. My family. I've had more cameras than I've had sexual partners or boyfriends. Combined. I do not count my Instagram photos, but they range in the 500's.

I always thought that no matter what happened, I'd have my pictures. When I got old, when my parents died, when my peers scattered and lived their lives in other spheres- I thought that these pictures might comfort me. Alzheimer's does not run in my family (according to 23andMe) but I always figured that even if it *did* sneak up on me, I'd have my pictures. My memories. My glue.

Since then I've built many photo websites, trying to organize many years' worth of sloppy archiving. When I was younger, the cloud wasn't a thing, so I didn't think ahead and instead burned my pictures onto CD. Over those years, I've moved a lot. And in my moments of bitter, adolescent anger (of which there are many) I've destroyed many CDs. And as a somewhat organized thirty two year old , I curse myself every day for not having the emotional strength to just PUT THEM AWAY. Put them in a box, hide them. Do something intelligent. Don't get fucking pissed at your two ex best friends one day and take a hammer to one of those DVDs. Think of your future self, who is no doubt staring at that same CD and wondering why, why god, didn't you just WAIT? Because of this, not to mention blind fucking irresponsibility- many of my CD's are un-usuable. I've bought cleaners and buffers and use three separate computers to try and coax old pictures to the surface, but the result is a mess. Afraid pictures would fall through the cracks, I would often reburn the same photo batches over and over again. Trying to make heads or tails out of this mess literally gives me high blood pressure. This is why my photo sites are always named Satori. Satori is the Japanese word for enlightenment. I know better now than to destroy years' worth of memories based off of one moment of anger. Because even my longest running anger...it ran out. And now I don't have any of that to look back on. To enlighten me further. To remind me that the thing I'm going through right now...that's gonna run out, too.

Satori has finally found (hopefully) it's forever home. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but it's up there. And people visit it. Nobody will ever know how much relief that brings me. However.

I was painstakingly rearranging one folder (I forget which) and I stopped to take a break. I had a drink and fell into the mind numbing lull of watching my TV. My TV is connected to my Amazon Cloud, and my Amazon Cloud holds my full library. Which means my TV's screensaver is a random slideshow of pictures, and it goes for hours. I could watch it for just as long. My friends and family endure it, but I doubt anyone gets the same pleasure as I do from the activity. I was watching the slideshow, as I always do, and then a terrifying, horrible, extremely unhealthy thought occurred to me.

What if I get old and I can't look at these pictures anymore?

Incredibly, my highly anxious brain had never, not once, not EVER-considered this. Presumably, and with very good likelihood: my parents will be gone by this time, and maybe even some of my friends, if we don't die strange and uncomfortable deaths via alcohol poisoning. I suddenly had a vision of myself as an old lady, sitting in some pee soaked nursing home, staring at my TV (or whatever else they'll be using as media players in 2068) and my first fear is not "Who are these people?" but rather, "Where are these people?" And my heart would break. And I'd have to put my pictures away. My life's work...for lack of a better word.

Now, you might think-'Jesus, Rae, just fucking enjoy it. Why are you thinking shit like this?" Hey, you think I like dealing with these fun little fucking ideas my brain suddenly comes up with? I know that death is a part of life. I know everyone around me is going to take a dirt nap at some point. Life is a celebration. And if you live a long life and it's been more kind than cruel, well, growing up in New Orleans will teach you that death is a celebration too, and it comes with second lines.

I hate my brain for doing this to me. I haven't stopped looking at my slideshow, but now when I do, I have a twinge of sadness for 2068 Rae, whose mental well-being is unknown to me. I won't know until I get there. I'm not ready to get there. My photographer grandpa (the one who owned the shop) didn't spend the remainder of his life (103 years) looking at a fucking slideshow. He traveled, at least a cruise a month, even after my grandma died, up until he was 101. He was mentally alert. He had never had a surgery, didn't drink, didn't smoke. He loved the same woman with blind devotion for seventy three years, right up until she died. He got to see Riley being born, and he knew the faces and names of all of his family members up until the day he left Earth. He didn't hide behind his camera; he used his camera. And now I wonder if the reason why he was so with it (besides healthy life habits) was because of his camera. I wish I could have asked him when I had the chance: how many pictures did you have at the end? He wasn't looking back on his life, because he was still living it.

I save pictures, I save convos. I save drawings. I save text messages. Not to get anyone in trouble or to prove a point, but to put in my secret blog so I can look back on them. So when I'm having a bad fucking day and my inner sixteen year old, who is constantly writing shitty poetry and wearing four inch spike bracelets- is suffering from a multitude of Linkin Park-esque angst and won't chill the fuck out, I can look in that blog and feel my chest warm. So I can remember I'm not goddamn invisible, and you're 32 years old so let's just cut the fucking emo bullshit, already.

I have my whole life up until this point in a Cloud, in a binder, in a blog. My whole fucking id is made up of the past. And I can't look at any of it, and because of satori, I can't delete it. I can't burn it. I can't trash it. I can't smash it with a hammer.

Because...what if?

-Rae