Do You Remember

Well, you called them ‘couple photographs’, I just called them ‘pictures of us being retards’, but there you go.

Anyway, the name isn’t important, what’s important is that they happened, and it’s one of my strongest memories of our relationship, probably due to the fact that we have photographic evidence that it happened.

You have always been obsessed with photography.
Whenever we went anywhere, even when we were younger, you would always bring your camera along.
You’ve been through, I’d say about ten cameras during the time I’ve known you; you have a habit of breaking them.
The only camera that you haven’t managed to break yet is that old Polaroid camera that your grandfather left for you in his will before he passed away.
I’d say that that is your favourite out of all the cameras you’ve been through and I think that would be why you’ve been so careful with it compared to the rest.

I think it was lucky that we were able to get any photos from the day of the ‘shoot’ at all.

Almost as soon as we took the last shot, your camera slipped from your fingers and landed heavily on the tiled floor of your kitchen.
Then you stepped on it, just for good measure.
Your reflexes obviously didn’t work for you at that point because the camera landed on the ground, and then you moved forward to catch it, and subsequently trod on it, making something spring open and creating a jagged crack that was the whole length of the camera.

“Oh, noooo,” you moaned, wringing your hands after removing your foot from the damaged item, “No no no no.”

I picked up the broken camera calmly and inspected it.
It was definitely one that needed to be thrown out; there was no way to fix it.
The pink plastic body was absolutely destroyed, mainly from the drop to the kitchen floor, but your foot helped destroy it just a little bit more.

With wide, worried eyes, you asked me if the memory card was okay, saying that as long as the memory card was okay, you didn’t care about the camera.
I slowly manoeuvred it out of the ruins and looked it over carefully, proclaiming it to be perfectly fine.

You jumped on me as soon as the word ‘fine’ was out of my mouth and you squeezed the life out of me before kissing me roughly.
The kiss was over too soon.
Just as we were getting into it, you pulled away and bolted upstairs to your bedroom, with me following you, grumbling about stupid excited boyfriends.

When I entered your bedroom, you were sitting at your computer desk, bouncing in your seat as you waited for the computer to read the memory card.
You turned slightly and spotted me standing in the doorway.
You got up out of your chair and offered it to me.
I began to refuse, saying that I’ll find my own chair (so chivalrous of me, I know) but you giggled and grabbed my hand, pulling me over anyway and plonking me down on the chair.
You then placed yourself in my lap and I wrapped my arms loosely around your waist.

As we waited for your old computer to wake up and read the memory card, I amused myself by kissing the back of your neck and watching you squirm.
It was fun for a while, but then you decided to pay me back.
By squirming and bouncing around on my lap.
I’m pretty sure you thought that it would just annoy me, but no, as you figured out, my lower body has a mind of its own.

“Addison, stop,” I said.
“Ha, you don’t like it when I annoy you, do you? So why do you annoy me?” you asked, and continuedarousing ‘annoying’ me.

“Addison, stop,” I said sharply again a minute later and you twisted around to face me.
“Why?” you whined, and I gave you a look that said ‘are you serious?’ before your eyes widened dramatically when you leaned back against me, “Ohhhhhh… that’s why…” you finished awkwardly.
“Yeah… so I’d really appreciate it if you stopped…”
“Yep,” you whispered, as the computer finally loaded the memory card and you squealed with delight, bouncing up and down again.

“ADDISON!”

“Sorry!” you squeaked, grabbing the mouse and double clicking on the icon that took us into the section where all your new photos were stored on the memory card.

There were four hundred of them.
All of them were of you or me, or the two of us together.
All of them.

Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised.
You’ve always been a perfectionist, and I don’t think we took one photo that you didn’t want to take again in the hope that it would be better the next time.

We spent the rest of the day looking through the photos.
You organised them into folders of the different poses and stuff, to make it easier to pick which one’s we liked from each pose.

It was easy for me to pick my favourites, and I always have them on me, either in my wallet or on my phone or on my iPod or…well, you get the idea, I always have them with me.

It’s hard for me to pick my favourite favourite out of my four favourites, but having had several years to think about it, I think the one of you pinning me to the wall of your bedroom with your arms around my neck about to kiss me is my favourite favourite – it shows your dominating side, and my god, do I love your dominating side.
That one’s probably followed by the one of you and me kissing on that fallen tree trunk that was in the park across the street from our houses.
And then the close-up one in the park (remember the reason why you changed clothes? I kindasortamaybe pushed you off the tree trunk after the photo was taken and you landed in the mud that was about two feet underneath us. My bad, sorry. But I like the purple jacket on you better).
And then the one where we’re not wearing shirts and I’m kissing you upside down like Spiderman kisses Mary Jane but much, much more gorgeous-er cause you’re in the photo and I’m not wearing some silly mask.
Notice a pattern? Yes, that's right. Photos of us kissing are much more exciting to me than just ones of us smiling like retards or pulling funny faces.

So yeah, out of four hundred photos, I picked four that I liked more than any of the others.
You picked about sixty, and when you were able to get them printed out at a photo print place, you stuck them all around your room (but not right away – our parents still didn’t know at that stage).

We spent a lot of our time after that day admiring the photos that we took, discussing them, reminiscing.
I’m actually looking at some of them now as I write this.

It pains me that we won’t be able to take any more photos like the ones we took that day.
We always imagined that we’d still be taking photos like that when we were forty, eighty.

I wish we could have.