Sometimes it happens: a photo from the past lands on your phone. Someone who is just packing up the house and found a picture of you from the age of 15 sends it to you, and I stare at it for a few minutes, a little shocked that I looked like that. I remembered myself much more horrible, like everything a 15-year-old girl can think of herself and not in the mirror of reality. Ugly, fat, what is this hair, how do you leave the house like that? From a distance of 30 years I see a really cute girl, thin and even too much, actually I was really fine. what a waste
It’s not that I didn’t see myself enough. Although there were no social networks in the nineties, I had mirrors. I guess like any 15 year old I saw what I wanted to see or what I didn’t want to see. And what was true at the age of 15, was also true at the age of 30, and at the age of 40.
Most of my life was spent not behind a lens, but in almost total presence in the moment itself. This may explain how I remember in detail the moment recorded in the photo, even though 30 years have passed. I even remember the one who said look, I want to take a picture.
I have almost no photos from that age, not a deliberate thing as we simply wouldn’t document every moment in our lives. Only special events: Purim, birthdays, family parties, trips. And that’s barely. I have maybe one picture of the sea from adolescence. Nothing that would betray the fact that a few months after the photo was taken, I already had a bridge installed on my teeth.
I have an album and a half incomplete, which record almost half a life. Each picture tells a complete story. I remember all the stories. This is next to tens of thousands of photos on the phone from the last few years that mean almost nothing. A lot of dishes, drinks, sky and landscape shots that I can’t even remember when I took them.
On my last flight, to pass the time, I started deleting photos. Four and a half hours of flight and 5,000 photos that at that moment said a lot but from the distance of time lost their vibration, went to the trash can. “Are you sure you want to delete these photos?” the app asked twice. Yes, I answered. “Permanently” they added, as if the word “permanent” would scare me into clicking “delete”, as if Dalit deletes something from your heart and mind and not just from a card The memory. I’m sure, I answered to myself in my heart. And deleted.
I had a moment of apprehension mixed with strange relief. I deleted memories that I might want to remember and forget. I erased memories that I might want to forget and remembered. Like after you clean the house and try not to leave dirty dishes in the sink, lately I’ve been careful not to load files of similar pictures that don’t mean anything. I don’t take out my phone when I’m with friends, hanging out, at a concert. I know I will never watch it. I will remember that I was. And if I forget? I will go again.
Sometimes I take a look at the sparse but accurate albums from my childhood, which seem to have been stitched together by the mind of a film editor who knew exactly which picture should be taken and on which page it should be placed. I admit that sometimes I feel like seeing more of the film that was cut in the middle and was not shot, the one that is replaced by only one static image that doesn’t move, which is supposed to tell the whole story. And maybe just because the picture isn’t there, I feel like watching it again, and if it was there I might never look at it again.
Not long ago I was on a business trip with some cute influencers, some of whom are about 20 years younger than me. Someone who saw me trying to focus on something with the phone asked me why I was shooting stills. “We don’t do that anymore today,” he added. “Everyone only takes video.” So I started taking videos, and uploading stories to Instagram with music in the background.
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Generation Z”, or if you like – the Hollywood corner of the Cannes Festival on the social network. It’s nice to see in the mirror of time the things you’ve experienced in life, the question is what will happen when all of this one day disappears and we’re left without Instagram, without the human ability to remember anything From the past because the memory of today is not the memory of the past. Maybe in the future no one will want to embrace anything, because we live in an age where the present is enough.
If you have to compare the number of times we pull out a phone to record versus the number of times we are not happy with ourselves in the present tense and are just thinking about how to change something, it seems to me that there is a tough competition here. I know it’s a cliché to say that in the end we all get old and don’t feel it, until Facebook pops up a photo from 2007, where we were a decade and a half younger and we realize that we actually looked not as bad as we thought back then. what a waste