A Bright Spot...

I was looking for some photos for my daughter this week, which sent me digging deep into my closet - back to the boxes I haven't looked through in years. The ones tucked underneath all the others. The ones I never actually make it to because I get distracted somewhere around box one.

Every once in a while, I make an attempt to organize the thousands of photos I've accumulated over my lifetime. I start with good intentions, sorting a few here and there, maybe even putting some into albums. But for the most part, they're still in boxes. Randomly. No rhyme or reason when it comes to year or decade or age.

After my mom died, my dad slowly started bringing over all the photos she had, too, so the collection grew even bigger. It's become one enormous project that my ADHD, quite honestly, cannot handle as one enormous project.

This particular trip down memory lane was partially inspired by a friend who had recently sent me some old photos - actually, pictures from negatives, because that's how old we are. We started talking about the '90s outfits and hairstyles we once (tried to) rock, and apparently that was all the motivation I needed to start digging.

As I made my way through the boxes, I came across something I'd completely forgotten about for the last 20-plus years: a binder of negatives my dad had given me years ago.

Curiosity got the best of me.

They were from my college days, when I took a photography class and spent hours shooting mostly black-and-white film and developing it in St. Francis' darkroom. I have no idea where you even take negatives to be developed anymore, so I did what any technologically advanced person would do: I held them up to a lamp and squinted.

There were lots of landscapes. College friends. Bouquets of flowers. Random moments I didn't immediately recognize.

And then there were a few images that almost brought me to tears.

They were photos from a part of my life I thought had disappeared except for whatever pieces of it were still tucked away in my memory. I'm a photo person, so having a gap of a few years with almost no pictures from that time makes it feel, in a strange way, like I didn't exist during those years.

I know I did, obviously.

But there's something about having the photographic evidence.

In essence, the negatives brought me something positive.

I figured out how to scan a few of them using my daughter's phone as a backlight and mine as a camera, and I sent the photos off to five or six people who were in them. They may have never seen these pictures before. I certainly don't remember them. 

I have no idea if I ever printed them in the darkroom at school or if they spent the last few decades exactly where I found them - living as negatives, tucked inside a binder in my house.

But suddenly, there they were.

People I knew. Places I'd been. Moments I'd lived.

Not necessarily all the moments - or the people - I most wish I had pictures with, but it's better than nothing.

And it's strange how healing it can be to fill in even one or two of the missing pieces of your own history.

There are entire stretches of my life that exist only in my memory now. No photos popping up in Facebook Memories. No camera roll to scroll through. No cloud quietly storing thousands of images in the background.

We took pictures. We developed some of them. We put them in albums or boxes and hoped they survived all the moves and all the years that followed.

And maybe a bonfire or two while trying to heal a broken heart.

When the pictures didn't survive, the memories had to survive on their own.

Over time, those memories get softer around the edges. Faces blur. Places change. Details disappear. You start to wonder if you remember things exactly as they happened or if you've rewritten them a little through the years.

There's something comforting about suddenly finding proof.

Yes, that person was there.

Yes, that place looked the way I remembered it.

Yes, that moment really happened.

Maybe that's why finding these negatives felt like more than finding some old photographs.

For years, those moments existed only somewhere inside me. Memories I could revisit, but never quite see again.

And now, more than two decades later, I can hold at least a few of them in my hands again.

Turns out, sometimes the things we think we've lost aren't really gone.

Sometimes they're just waiting at the bottom of a box we never quite got around to opening.