Memories And “Used To Be’s”.
I was reminiscing with my beautiful friend this last Tuesday, as we spent a much-needed day together, catching up, regaling in our recent activities, the hustle and bustle of everyday life. I decided to take us both down memory lane and dusted off the old photo albums and sat with her, cup of tea in hand, flicking over decades (at least 4!) of life.
I have known my friend for 46 years and we have always stayed together, through school, adolescence, the birth of our children (both within 4 months of one another), marriages, jobs, the lot! We have both kept each other grounded all that time, supported one another, and celebrated our respective fiftieth birthdays.
When I showed her the photos from when we were teenagers, she was taken aback by the memories. There were snaps of us at our friend’s house, all lined up on the sofa, pulling silly faces, wearing eighties hair styles, huge trainers and the typical fashion of the time. Then there were photos of the noughties, one she had never seen! She barely recognized herself and we had to try and piece our memories together to recall where we were on these!
There were photos of our children, as toddlers, playing together! They are both 28 now, almost 29 for my son. Where does time go! All these photos prove that time is a twinkle of the eye, gone before its appreciated it, forgotten in a dusty album, until brought back to life with a cup of tea and company.
Perspectives change so much, but time disguises this and we don’t realise how much we’ve changed until we see a photo we’ve never witnessed before and hear the echoes of our youth. Our skin looked amazing, but we took it for granted! Our hair was lustrous and thick, but we paid no attention to this, only focusing on whether the hairspray would last the night. We were never “fat”, in fact, our figures were the best they would ever be, yet at the time, we berated our reflections, convinced we were huge, when in fact we had the lithe figures that our twenties awarded us.
Each page in my album displayed an array of versions of ourselves, each representing a memory, a time in our life, where we would picture our home at the time, what our jobs were, what relationships we had, how old our children were. For me, some photos brought back memories of struggles, when I was a single parent, working seven days a week, doing my nurse training. Other photos are taken from a flat I moved into in the year 2001, a home I came to love, having had an horrific experience in the previous house.
The pictures of youth, with our school friends, show the innocence in our eyes, the carefree smiles, the jovial postures, and these ones are especially sentimental. I want to go back to that girl, the younger self, and tell her she is going to be ok. I want to let her know that I am her strength, and the older version of her is here, on another timeline, looking back, keeping watch.
My friend and I reflected on our lives so far, and wondered, with cup in hand, ready to dunk another biscuit, if we would be lucky enough to be back here in another decade or two, studying photos of us now, at a point far away in time, thinking how lucky we were. Well, we are lucky now, here, in the moment. Because it’s all we have. Every blessing must be received with gratitude, and every single day is one. So, as they say, make it count! And seal it with a polaroid!
