I found a CD full of stuff I backed up in 2000.
Some of it dates back to 1992.
Some of it I don’t remember ever seeing, some of it I do but it’s been such a long time.
I had all these officecam pictures from when I worked at Time-Warner, and I pointed a camera at my face, or out the window.
I took countless quantity of photos like this.
I had a webcam at home, too, for a long time.
But I found this somewhat startling set of pictures of, I mean webcam pictures, from this woman I used to talk to a lot.
I guess I forgot how beautiful she was, and I’m looking at these pictures thinking “How did I let this one get away?”
But, then I remembered, God she was boring as hell, and she got married anyway, so…
You move on, right?
She was the one who made the memorable comment about marriage.
I asked her what it was like, or if it was any different… I don’t know what I asked her but she said that being married is just like being single except there’s somebody there all the time.
She didn’t say a lot of profound things but I take that to be one of them. Or about as profound as she would get.
I found some other embarrassing shit from the early BBS days.
I used to write emails to myself, talking to myself as if I was somebody else.
I had no memory of that until I saw these messages to myself and remember that oh, wow, I used to do that, that’s strange.
Seeing these old pictures like that, unexpectedly, reminds me of the time when I was a kid I got photos developed at the Eckerd Drug Store.
This can’t have been the first time I got photos developed, but they were from summer camp.
I opened the envelope, I looked at the first picture, and I started to cry.
Not bawling crying but seeing these images made me feel sad for some reason.
I still get that way sometimes, especially when the pictures are of other people besides myself.
There is so much silence in a photograph.
That’s what makes me sad.
The silence.
The silence.