wayback playback

I've always had a thing for revisiting the past. As anyone who knows me well can tell you, I love to return to my favorite books, movies, and albums. They remind me so clearly of specific times in my life, and those personal connections have a way of smoothing over the imperfections of, say, the subtleties of the tragically hip lifestyle in Garden State (which I saw my first month of college, and have watched (and cried through) at every major transition point of my life since), or the childish humor of Barbara Park's Almost Starring Skinnybones (which will never be eclipsed on my best-of-literature list).
This affection for nostalgia definitely comes from my mom - she who saves everything. I realized early on that little treasures stashed in the back of my closet would stay there, awaiting rediscovery on a boring summer afternoon. I'd be lying if I said this last visit to my parent's house was the first time I'd read through the stack of on-again, off-again diaries I kept from age seven to about fifteen. In fact, the cause for picking up a new diary was often reading through the old one. I remember feeling very strongly that I needed to create a new (more eloquent) version of myself for The Future to remember. I was never very disciplined with diary-keeping, but does it really matter? When I did write daily entries, they were just a play-by-play of the day's events. But the random times that my past self decided it was necessary to record some monumental event (mostly having to do with boys, or my ever-shifting Best Friend) the entries are long, excitedly scrawled explanations of episodes that were clearly weighing heavily on my adolescent mind.
And so, last week, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor inside my old closet, speed-reading through a tour of my younger self, just as I have so many times before, thinking how funny these entries were, how young I was. I realized that ten years from now, I may very well be clicking through this online diary of sorts, remembering specific events based on the details I decided to highlight here. Cue this film, consider mind blown.

1) age five, kindergarten portrait (pre-diary)
2) age nine / ten? (I probably wrote the pictured entry around when this was taken)
3) senior portrait, age seventeen