March 28, 2006

10 Years

When I was in college, before the dawn of the digital camera or the camera phone or the iPod camera phone or anything else that they come up with, I was still the girl who was always taking a million photographs. (Even then I was big on self portraits.)

It's amazing to me, looking back through them all now, that those captured images, as delicate and fragile as they were waiting there on that roll of film, made it out of the camera without being lost or destroyed or exposed. We weren't always of sound mind, and even though I have the pictures to prove it, I don't necessarily remember always carting a camera with me or asking people to stop so I could take their picture.

My roommate Kim and I loved our scrapbooks and it was always a fun day when I would get prints back from the photo lab Uptown and could get to work sticking them in my books. Our scrapbooks were so mythical, in fact, that when Kim got married in 2003 and I knew my former roommate Bridget was going to be there (a girl I hadn't seen since graduation day 1998), I packed my junior/senior year book in my suitcase for the trip to Cleveland.

When I pulled it out of my bag Bridget bounded over to me and squealed and we sat on the bed and poured over it. She took it back to Chicago with her to show her then boyfriend and I finally, finally got it back yesterday.

Last night I flipped through it page by page and memories and names and people and places hit me in a rush.

I hardly recognize myself in some of the pictures, like this one, even though in some ways I look older then than I do now.

This photo was taken at my boyfriend's fraternity formal and my eyes are glassy from too much champagne and my smile is wide from new love (and too many glasses of champagne). We'd only been dating a few weeks here, but like most college relationships that blossom in close quarters, we were already fully in it. We had a class together that met three times a week and he would make the short walk from his fraternity house to my off-campus apartment almost nightly. We set my roommate Dana up with one of his brothers for the formal and the four of us drove down to Cincinnati together. I realize now how annoying that must have been for the other hotel guests, an avalanche of college students playing dress up in cocktail attire and sport jackets, whose only real mission was to get as drunk as possible amid different scenery. But we thought we were grown up in our dresses and ties, making toasts with champagne flutes that were engraved with the fraternity's letters and the year.

We thought we were special when we were really just same.

I thought my relationship with him was special, it was to me, but looking back now it was just that college romance that everyone has, if they're lucky. We fought and yelled and made up and held hands on the slantwalk. He took me for granted and I broke up with him via telephone during summer break so that I could make out with a football player.

The road from 20 to 30 has been long, and chronicled, but when I look at this photo it seems like I somehow blinked from there to here. From her to me. Like if I wasn't more careful, I might have missed it.

Posted by hannah at 05:03 PM