In the heart of my own little treasure chest under my bed, buried beneath a pile of journals and old letters and stamped postcards, lies a box of polaroids. They’re lying in a disorderly shuffle, moments stacked on top of each other, spanning the years: slices of watermelon, a rainbow during an august rain, a road trip to the happiest place on earth that I took with my best friend a year ago. These are only a handful of moments, but somehow they are more meaningful than the thousands of other digital photos on my computer.
The thing about polaroids is that those snapshots are imprinted on the film in the same way that a memory is imprinted in your mind. When you look back at moments, you remember some details better than others. On a November afternoon, my family spent all day hiking around the Grand Canyon. Do you know what I remember most? Not the vast horizon, not the touch of infinity, not the incomprehensible height. I remember standing next to a naked gnarled juniper tree and gazing up at the way its branches scraped the cloudy sky.
The best moments of your life are like polaroids.
You lift up the camera and snap once. With a sharp flash and a hum, the picture emerges. A single expression of this moment, imperfect, holy. It might be off-kilter or out of focus, too light, too dark — and yet it is perfect, because every one captures a memory in its most unfiltered form. It might be rushed, or blurry, but c’est la vie.
When you search back through the haze of your years, certain experiences are colored in vivid detail, like a juniper tree on the rim of the edge of the world. Others might be more of a feeling, an overall grasp of how you felt at a certain period in your life. Christmases and Sunday mornings and family dinners might blur together, but you remember laughing. You remember light.
As I flip through the pages of my journal, the pasted pictures stand out more than the stories. It only takes a glance. The pictures are like listening to your old favorite songs — familiar but new, all at the same time. It’s like when you hear a song on the radio, and suddenly you’re seventeen again and you’re in the passenger seat of your best friend’s car, and the two of you are flying down the freeway singing along to the radio at the top of your lungs. You’re eighteen, driving home from your waitress job at ten o’clock and wondering how there are so many people in the world that you will never know. You’re twenty, on a train ride home from college, watching the rippling waves of the Pacific Ocean crash against the cliffs outside the window. A snapshot, a song; moments and memories.
Taking pictures changes you. It reminds you to pay attention to your life, to search for a new angle, to see the things that might be transient to other people. Autumn leaves on the sidewalk, the dark of the sky after dusk, the sight of a plane overhead flying to far distant places, the messy kitchen counter, text messages asking for you to pick up groceries on your way home from work. Those ordinary moments become beautiful. Your tangled hair and crumpled white sheets and the sun peeking through window shades are beautiful — even if no one remembers those things but you.
The camera has only existed for a little more than two hundred years, but I like to think it has changed us. Life on earth is fleeting, we all know that. Our existence is a mist that fades with the dawn, the flicker of a beach bonfire, a town that others pass on their road trip to a greater destination.
Life is more precious because it doesn’t last long. Blink and you miss it. Maybe we take pictures because we want to remember our lives—all of it, the messes and the miracles.
Maybe we photograph what we don’t want to forget. That’s why the camera roll of our phone feels like a journal. It is a diary of the way you see the world.
Here’s to the many polaroid moments to come,
<3 Olivia Grace
