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Most of the shelves in my room are filled with books. One, however, contains my life.
Photo albums. I have 4 of them, with pictures since I was around 3. The first photo in the album is me, sitting on my dad’s lap, in my grandfather’s apartment. There are a lot of people in the room, so it must have been either a dinner after my grandmother’s funeral, or after my aunt’s wedding. They were about a week apart. You can’t tell, because some people are smiling, and some look sad. I have photos from before then, but they are stored somewhere else.
The first album is somewhat large, containing a big part of my life. Kindergarten, primary school, high school. Trips all over Europe. The summer when I was 17, spent babysitting 3 kids (Dolapo, aged 5, Kike, aged 3 and Seun, aged 1) in London. I have one picture, with the youngest baby in my arms. I’m all red and sweaty, and he’s holding on very tight to me. He got scared by the girl who was taking the picture, because she wanted to hold him, and he didn’t like strangers. (She was an exchange student, staying at our house). He found safety in my arms .
The second album is the last year of my highschool and my university years. It has photos of my scholarships in England and Portugal. Unfortunately, my camera broke in Portugal, so I had to rely on photos taken by my friends. There’s also the summer course I took in Germany. It was a wonderful experience. For the first time, I was not isolated, I was part of a group – together with the people from the Ukraine, Morocco, Denmark, Romania and others. We were friends, and we had fun, and Germany seemed like a beautiful, friendly place.
The third album is my summer in Bulgaria and winter in the Netherlands. It contains the pictures of my first boyfriend, the cute, cute boy who was the first person I kissed, at the age of 24. The fourth album is my trip to America.
Photo albums are the most obvious way to store your life, but not the only one.
I have a tiny brown porcelain elephant, with a trunk that fell off and had to be re-glued. My parents bought it for me, together with a blue hare, which is now long gone, when we were visiting Warsaw. I was 3 or 4. We went to see the Palace of Culture and Science, the highest building in Warsaw, a gift to Poland from the Soviet Union. I don’t remember the view, but I remember buying the porcelain figurines and little sticky stars, that you could stick onto your ears and pretend they were earrings.
A glass filled with stones. They were the stones from the beach in Hastings, England. This is where my highschool class spent two weeks, at a summer course of English. Next to the stones, there are seashells. I’m not sure if any of them come from England. There are plenty from Portugal, and they are just so pretty.
There is a little bronze cat, from a museum in Copenhagen. Is it supposed to be a replica of an Egyptian sculpture? I forgot. And an amber frog, from when we went to the seaside with my parents. I don’t remember spending a lot of vacations with them. This time, after I finished highschool, was the first time in a long while. We met up with my mom’s sister, who lives in Germany. We slept in late, and went to the beach when everyone else was getting ready for lunch.
I also have a postcard album. I buy postcards everywhere I go to. Except for Bulgaria, cause the postcards there were all ugly. The album itself was bought in Warsaw, where I had a 2-week traineeship in the Office for European Integration. There are the sepia postcards of Cambridge and Oxford. There is a postcard of a fishmarket in Hastings, with the photo dated 1928. There’s one of St Paul’s cathedral, amid the flames of the war. There’s one of the poor neighbourhood in Porto, with the laundry hanging out of the windows. There are many postcards of Cracow. The last one is the sculpture of Atlas in New York.
Where do you store your life?
Posts: 5700 | Registered: Feb 2002
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In my writing. I remember the circumstances around each half-finished story very well. "I wrote this because I'd just read Harry Potter for the first time..." "I got an A on this because I wrote small..." "This is the first story I ever drew..."
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