Don't let the photos Fade

Alright, here we go the first post of The Don’t Travel Blog... I’ve been sitting at my desk staring at a wall for 20 minutes trying to figure out what a great opener to this would be and honestly, I have no idea, so now I’m writing this sentence and I don’t know what I’m about to say next, sooo I guess welcome to my stream of consciousness (and apparently the world’s longest run on sentence).

Ironically, this little blurb isn’t going to treat travel as the subject, but as the catalyst to jump into a bunch of sappy nonsense I’ve been thinking about lately, so I guess proceed at your own risk. Time to settle in and let those late-night ponderings and existential thoughts creep in and take over (wow absolutely loving that this *fun and upbeat* post is totally setting the tone for the DTB, good going Chloe this is great… okay, okay get back on track). Okay! Enough blabbing, I guess that intro will just have to do.

Back in November, I visited a friend in Rhode Island for Thanksgiving, because I decided it was time for me to be the center of my coming-of-age Hallmark Christmas movie. Obviously, I realized how unlikely meeting my literal “Prince Charming” was, but somehow after the year I had, had clinging onto the fantasy of trudging through a small, snow-dusted town and spontaneously meeting a halfway decent guy who owned a bakery or chopped down trees seemed like the only thing I had left to look forward to. Yes, don’t worry I realized how ridiculous this was, but little did I know the plot of a sappy Hallmark classic was truly about to unfold.

Time to set the scene.

Day 3: it was a cheeky 19°F outside in North Kingstown, RI. So, small town was a check, snow-dusted was a double check (more like snow-engulfed, the southern Californian in me was absolutely screaming). I was climbing into the back of my friend’s family SUV; we were headed to the local Christmas tree farm. As I looked out the icy sliver of the third-row window, I couldn’t help thinking that this was it: the start to my movie.

We arrived in the muddy parking lot, and it really did feel like the lights and cameras were on, the director sitting close by yelling out directions and notes on where to improve the scene. I felt like, maybe there was a little bit of hope left for 2021, maybe things were about to turn around; And as we were about to leave, they did.

After my friend’s family found their perfect little Charlie Brown, we walked up to a shack and immediately I was in awe. The entire little wooden cabin was filled from ceiling to floor with faded pictures of members of the town over the years. Immediately, because I am the perfect mixture of Millennial and Gen Z, I took out my phone and started taking pictures of the pictures. I loved the history and the thought that something so seemingly insignificant, with no traditional meaning to me, looked to hold such a weight for so many others.

Now I’m going to be honest, up until this point I have misled you to believe that my movie character had her big epiphany in a dramatic crescendo of a moment standing in the middle of that shack, and that my Hallmark Christmas movie ended right there tied up in a nice, timely, little bow, but that’s not true. It wasn’t until March of 2022, that I looked back at one of the photos I took that day and started to actually think of the people in those fading photos…

Around the same time I went to RI, I saw a TikTok that I think about often. It was a girl saying that she never wanted to let another person mistreat her. She had seen a picture of herself at three years old and all she wanted to do was hug her younger self because that little girl “deserved the whole world”. This delves into a subject of self-love, confidence, and relationships (definitely the center of another post) but it also relates to what I eventually learned at the end of my Hallmark movie: experiences good and bad are going to occur and you can feel a multitude of emotions about each and every one of them. But the people who were a part of those experiences, who maybe even were the catalyst to whatever came next, have nothing to do with how those experiences affect you. You don’t have them to thank for the person you are, you have your past self; The person you used to be, the person who no longer exists.

It’s funny, a picture can tell a thousand words about a person who no longer exists and it’s remarkable how that person staring back at you will never exist again. The subject of the photo may or may not still be alive, that isn’t what I mean by the word “exists”, what I mean is after that photo is taken that person will continue to collect different experiences and these experiences will continue to change and mold them into hundreds and hundreds of different people. As I stared at a beige and brown photo of a 6-year-old blowing out his birthday candles, I saw a 6-year-old going on 46. He is the only one who knows everything he has been through; A collection of experiences, where he chose how those experiences were going to shape the countless different people he was going to be, because ultimately that 6-year-old “deserved the whole world”.