christmas

My friend J is going to a Red Sox game and texted me last night, asking to borrow my camera.

This morning I pulled the camera off the shelf, grabbed my stuff and headed to work. Wisely, I checked to make sure the battery was good and that I had emptied the contents of the memory… I hadn’t.

215 images? From when? WTF was I doing with my camera for the past six months?

I started downloading to my computer a few minutes ago.

The first picture was a very cute yellow lab-type dog. Who’s is that? I don’t know a dog that looks like that.

The next was a butt. Who’s was that? It looks like.. no, yep, that’s the cousin’s husband… Ohhh, OK, then that means that’s her dog. Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. Kinda.

Santa hats, trees and sweaters—ahh, Christmas, 2005. It’s all coming back to me now.

There are pictures of me interspersed with those of my cousins, my sister (um, was there some sort of fashion shoot that one of the little people did, ’cause I did not take these pictures, lol) and my parents. I look happy, healthy and tan (duh, I was going to go to Hawaii in a week)—and it’s odd seeing myself that way. I remember that night I got sick, just a little stomach thing, but we now know it was the beginning of the really bad illness. I’d had a drink or two and my liver had already slowed functioning and was unable to process it.

The next set of pictures were of me when I was sick. I vaguely remember us thinking it would be good to have a reminder (like I’m ever really going to forget)… there’s my eyeballs, my stomach, my chest and ahh yes, the battle bruises from the psycho nurse from hell. Yeah, never going to forget those.

It’s odd seeing your recent past, one that you can only partially reconstruct, flash before you. I don’t have any solid memory of Christmas.. I don’t remember taking these pictures of my arms and stomach. They’re blurry and out of focus, so I assume I was trying to take them—but I don’t honestly know.

It’s a very odd way to start the day.