Finding my parents old photo album wrecked me a bit. The reality of the past captured in faded photographs contrasts too much with my present foggy reality.
I will be honest. I have an aversion to having my photos taken. I never had that as a child but as I grew up, I avoided the camera unless I am the one wielding it.
However, yesterday was a revelation. Photographs are beautiful. They carry the weight of a thousand memories we often tend to forget… sometimes because they are too painful to remember or sometimes, because they are too beautiful that looking back hurts you a lot.
Looking at photographs is like walking down memory lane. It helps you piece back together the tattered pieces of yourself. It makes you remember your essence as a person. It makes you recall the equally beautiful and painful memories of your yesterdays and by so doing, it enables you to remember what matters.
Having your pictures taken with the people you are with captures the moment forever – something for you to look back on once the moment and sometimes, the people in them, have left your life.
Well, ‘selfies” are another matter. It only enhances the vagueness of the moment. But, having group pictures taken with your friends, your family, your classmates – well, these are the photos that are really worth looking back on.
This was probably taken when I was only four or five years old, with my baby sister then, my Nanay and Tatay (they don’t look anything like this now and I can’t remember them looking this way at all!), and Tatay’s younger sister.
With Tatay, and my younger sisters. My sisters keep laughing at how attention-deficit I was back then. I always loved having everyone’s, including the camera’s, attention. ( I wonder where that girl went though).
With Nanay and my younger sisters… So much has changed over the years…
At five or maybe six years old… with Nanay (and I don’t know the person beside her). Nanay used to be the Canteen Manager at PNHS.
At seven or something, with my sisters and some cousins and neighbors taken during the baptism of a cousin…You will no longer recognize these faces anymore… I haven’t met some of them again…
Plaza forays in my elementary days….
Fiesta Shoot: This was during a fiesta celebration at my father’s home town. I was with an aunt, my siblings and a cousin I seldom see nowadays.
Two or three years later at my father’s home town. I was in Grade Six and just had an operation. I remember not wanting to go there because it was too hot and my forehead (a node/lump/cysts was removed a week ago I think) was itching a lot.
Grade V, during a fiesta event in our hometown… with my sister who was then in Grade II.
In church, after our “pag confirma” which I still don’t understand until now…All I remember at that time was I want to go home already!
Grade VI Recognition Day with Nanay and my sisters…
Still in Grade VI, when motherhood for me, began. I am holding the current youngest sibling in our family. To think that I was nanny for the two youngest boys, and now, they are all taller than me!
Pieces of the me falling in line… now, if I can find the remaining pieces….
PS… will buy a camera for all those memories to hoard in the future…
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