The Bench

I'm a terrible photographer. Absolutely awful. And the true irony of my life is that I absolutely love to collect photos. I hoard pictures so much, in fact, that I've exhausted the memory of my phone, laptop, and external hard drive. This has started to become a real issue for me, actually, because I'm inherently distrustful of new technologies, and it seems that ambiguously intimidating "cloud" services are my only option.

In any case, in an attempt to replenish some of the memory not controlled by an omnipresent cloud, I've begun to go through old photographs to see if there's any that I don't absolutely need to keep. But one thing led to another, and instead of deleting photos I began going through them. I found myself slowly pressing the right arrow key, and allowed myself to be washed in the faces and landscapes on my computer screen. Nostalgic smiles and bubbles of sadness floated though me pretty harmlessly as I sank into the memories these photos provide me with. I felt little stabs of awareness about the passage of time, like pin pricks in my fingers − I was skinnier in this one, I was happier in that one. Life is different now. I have changed. It's not a bad feeling, really. But there's something to be said for the harrowing experience of physically witnessing yourself grow up. And I think everyone probably has a picture or two that really cuts to the core of it. A picture (or series of pictures) that tosses all the bullshit smiles away, and makes your stomach twist into a bittersweet knot.

For me, this picture pretty unassuming. It's me in the nighttime, 20 years old, god-awful red hair (it may or may not have been box-dyed by yours truly), sitting on a park bench. The picture was taken from my left side, and the streetlights illuminating me are cut into shadows by the beer can I'm pressing against my lips. My hair is thrown back, unbrushed, and my eyes look young and full. It's easy to tell that instead of sipping the beer, I'm just laughing into it. My lips are curling up around the metal tab, kissing it with a frozen giggle. I'm washed in the yellow glow that seems to be unique to cities in the nighttime, the yellow glow that for some reason makes everything seem fake, like you're watching it happen as a secondary observer of the world. Behind me is a tall, gray-bricked building with ornate buttresses and gothic brickwork spiraling into the sky. There are lights below the building, pointing up from the grass and sending hues of soft purple cascading upwards, creeping up over the bricks and dissolving into moonlit charcoal. An iron-wrought fence with swooping metalwork and sharp pikes surrounds it, ending just behind me, and the two structures work together as if to say, "Ah, the Romance."

All in all, it's a pretty normal picture for a college student to have. Pretty buildings, cheap beer, crappy hair. I'm not exactly in the minority for having pictures like this. But when I look at that picture, I see something more; I feel something more. I'm washed in the memory of that photo being taken; the emotions and turbulence surrounding that day, the gut-wrenching need for adventure, the thirst for some kind of marrow I hadn't discovered yet.

I remember walking 20 miles with my best friend because we were too poor to afford a train. We dragged our feet behind us from dawn until midnight, refusing to allow exhaustion and blisters to keep us from a world we were going to conquer. I'm still not sure if we chose to sit down, or if our legs just gave out, but either way, the bench in the picture became our new and welcome home, if only for a few hours.

I remember the relief when, without a word, she pulled out a beer from her backpack and handed it to me, cracking open one of her own. The can felt like ice in the January frost, but my bones were too tired to shiver. We stayed like that for a while, drinking beer and looking out on the night. The flurry of cars, red and yellow and black, blurred together in my bleary eyes, and I fancied that I was beginning to understand impressionism The people, too, lent their color to the scene, adding touches of skin, fabric, and hair, and we watched them as they came and went. From the confines of the bench the city felt alive, an ongoing tapestry of sound and events, but to us it was silent as we sunk into the honking horns and the lilting voices, letting them carry us to a peaceful meditation.

After a while, I started to notice passer-bys started to give us "the eye." A realization broke in my mind that maybe I was being rude by taking up a bench with no intent to leave. My friend must've had the same realization, and turning our heads, we shared a simultaneous look. I studied her; her wildly curly hair was sprawling around her in a way that was somehow dreamy and intimidating at the same time; her coat was torn and frayed, faded and too worn-in from months of blatant abuse; her duct-taped shoes and ripped jeans that looked like they were desperately trying to fall apart; her 30oz. beer can completing her definition of Gutter Chic in a part of the city that would always be too fancy for us. She looked ridiculous. So did I. She started smiling. I reciprocated. Then we were giggling, and pointing at each other, and then laughing, hunched over, gut-bursting laughter, dying at the sight of each other. So ridiculous, so out of place, and yet here we were. We sat up, tears streaming down our faces, smiling fearlessly from exhaustion and elation. I threw my hair behind me, tilted my head back, and just as my lips touched the can, she took a picture of me.

We laughed some more, and spent an hour longer on that bench, downing cans of can after can and throwing our excited voices into the fray.

My photo is a photo of me, young and tipsy, it the middle of a foreign city. It's a photo of me claiming a park bench as my home. It's a photo of the choice to find beauty in the brutally personal instead of the universally admired. In that moment, I needed nothing else in the world. My coat could remain faded and thin, my shoes could have holes, my wallet could be empty, so long as I was there, on that park bench in winter, drinking beer and laughing.

That's why I could never get rid of my "bad" photographs, and why I would never encourage someone else to. The photos I've collected in my lifetime represent more than just people and places; they are moments, intrinsically and personified. They matter more than the moments we try to capture purposefully. These pictures are reminders that happiness can be found in exhaustion and empty wallets, and they inspire me to continue on my quest to find more moments. The only quest that matters, really.