Before I left for university, I scraped my friends' and my old Skype group chat for photos. Photos of ourselves, each other, the things we were doing, the places we went, and I compiled them into a massive, curated collection. I put them on a USB stick and drove down to the Walmart. I remember the experience so clearly because the person working at the photo desk was someone in my literature class. I gave her the drive. She gave me a funny look. I asked her how much it'd cost to print them, smallest size, lowest quality. She quoted me at around 200$. I was… undeterred, albeit a lot less excited. Printing photos costs a lot of money, especially when you've got so many, especially when they know nobody else in town is doing it at the lower end of the price scale. But it was important. It was my friends and my going away present, and it was as much for them as it was for me.

Today I'm inching towards the end of my undergraduate degree. I've got a long program, and at this point I'm trying not to burn myself out (any worse than I already am). My oldest friends in this town, this new town, are wrapping up their degrees faster than I am. I'll still have friends here, people whom I care about quite a bit, but some of the folks I've been with for the longest are starting to look for the door. I thought now would be a good time to think about how to commemorate our time together as we start figuring out how to move on.

But whereas before I had a lot of material to work with, today, I scroll back through my camera roll and find it empty. I took maybe four pictures this year so far. Last year, maybe twenty. Most of them were posters of events I never made it to. So much has happened, and yet I have no record, no evidence, no way to prove to myself that it did.

It's fine that I don't take pictures like I used to. I don't need to prove it to myself that it happened. I know it happened because I lived it. And yet, there's something that feels melancholic about having no record. My mother always told me as a kid, someone who resisted having their photograph taken, that when I grew up, I would thank her. And to an extent I think she was right. I get it now.

I read Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha the other month; something I've been meaning to do for a while. I'm not sure how much I got out of the book. I didn't really feel like it was written so as to speak to me, which is fine. One thing I did get out of it was this desire I think I share with the author to feel documented, or recorded. Not in a voyeuristic way, like an anthropologist documenting a culture they refuse to actually understand, but in my own words. My own stories. Our stories. The stories they don't tell, that we are liable to tell, lest they be lost forever.

People living on the margins aren't really of interest to the powers that be, or those who maintain our collective archives. Our stories may be actively subversive by their mere existence. They don't publish our books, or air our performances, give us stage time… We need to take these things into our own hands to ensure we have something to pass on to those who come next, so that they can continue the work of collective liberation.

On a personal level, the same rings true. I have journals from my time in high school. They can be hard to read for one reason or another, be that because they're cringey or just sad, but in any case, they speak to a way I thought at a particular time in life. That can be important to remember, and easy to forget.

A few months ago I was out on a walk with some of my friends, and it occurred to me that if I was five years younger, I would have taken out my phone and captured the moment in a photograph. Then, years later, I'd look back on it and remember what they meant to me. That day, for one reason or another, I didn't take out my camera. I didn't try to save the memory. I convinced myself that it'd be better to live in it, keep it for what it was, rather than to store it in a representation so perfect as to poorly represent what it truly meant to me in that moment. Now all I have is a story to tell about how I was too proud to take a picture with my friends.

I guess it doesn't really matter how records are kept. Journaling is a lot more work but it does fill in the gaps between what pictures fundamentally cannot capture. It does matter that they're being kept, to help us better understand where we came from and to frame where we're going.

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