Analog Part 2

A year ago I began my analog photography journey. I am obsessed with it. I love the look of film; I love the texture, the beautiful colors, the way the lens focuses on the subject. Below are some of the shots I have taken over the past few months.

And still.

Note from the future: These are very raw descriptions of the grief I was feeling when one of my closest friends passed away. I wrote these as an avenue to grieve and to document grief. They are honest and mostly unfiltered. If anything I wrote hurt, offended, or upset you, please talk to me. Currently, I am in a much better place and I am at peace with the situation. Yes, it still hurts, but I am surviving.

Three weeks.

Life happens. Life evolves. You move forward. Still, it hurts.

The week started off well. I was doing better. I had things to distract me. I didn’t feel so alone. I still missed you, but I was going to survive.

Towards the end of the week, all of that crashed and burned. I felt so alone.

Some of the photos I shared were never supposed to see the light of day or were only originally shared between me and you. And suddenly, everyone flung them up everywhere. It was like a deep part of me had been ripped away from me. I didn’t make the folder to get credit. I made it for you. I made it for your family. I made it for your friends. I knew that this was a possibility when I created it, but I would do it over and over again. They always take, take, take, and no one wants to help give or make it happen. The usual.

I didn’t even feel this angry yesterday. It comes and goes in waves. Sometimes grief makes you irrationally angry. You have to feel it, as much as it hurts you have to dig in there and let it come out, reason with it, feel it out, and then come to terms with it. You have to take it over or it will take over you. I don’t want to sit here and suffer for months because I shoved all those feelings down in the beginning. I need to go through it now before it poisons me later.

I’m not going to ask for help from people who cannot give it. I need to be with someone who knew him.

They cannot be there for me. I understand that it is a hard time. So, I was brave. I sought help on my own end. I found ways to heal alone. I try to forgive them. Grief can make you out to be someone you are not. I try to be there for others because that is what you do for them. Friendship is giving without expecting anything in return. Friendship means being there for your friends when they are hurting. I want to be kindness for the sake of being kind.

I dream about you. You sneak into many of them. I dream about them. I dream that they are there for me. Then, I wake up to a very sad reality.

You were one of the few people who meant a lot to me that I was still able to contact consistently. You kept up with me. I still had you, and I loved you for that. I loved that even though we were so far apart, you were still there. My last connection to an important part of my life. In seconds, you were gone.

I lost them when I left Chile. I was already missing them terribly and felt like I had no one who I could talk to. I’d send a message and receive no response. But, I still had you. I hadn’t lost you. And then I did, and my whole world came crashing around me. Now, it feels like I have no one.

It hurts now. It hurts so deeply. I am so hurt. I am so sad. I am so angry. But, those feelings will pass. I must FEEL them. My feelings are valid. Maybe some of those feelings are unfounded. They probably do care about me. But, that doesn’t invalidate how I feel now.

I remember that one day that you and I stayed in the water and freedove together. You kept pushing me to dive down correctly. “Nope, again.” And then, I did it. “Can I do another one?” “As many as you would like.” So I dove over and over again. I watched you rocket down to the bottom and glide over the swaying kelp. No photographs exist of that moment. I only keep it in my memory. As the sun hid below the surface and the colors faded to navy blue, you and I shared the sea together and dove. Thank you for that.

Another time there was a party at someone’s house. I was almost too tired to go and was at a point where I needed some time alone, but I went anyway. You were there with your new puppy. I stayed glued to you and Chai. He crawled from your lap to mine and collapsed into me. I was so happy. I felt like your baby had accepted me.

Sometimes I would get mad at you. Sometimes I needed space away from you. I sometimes feel bad about that now. I feel bad for the times I did not respond well to you. But, I cannot be angry at myself for that. That just means that we had a deeper relationship. No one is perfect, and if you feel like someone is, you don’t know them well enough.

When other people didn’t believe in me, you did. You remembered to contact me about parties others forgot to invite me to. You would text me sometimes to ask how everything was going. When I went to the doctor, YOU texted me multiple times just to make sure I was ok. You made sure I rested. You made sure I ate. You encouraged me to push for the things I needed. You said some things that really hurt me, but that happens in friendships. You said some things that saved me, too.

I wish others took the time to get to know you better. I wish you felt more loved. I wish people cared more. I wish they saw you as more than a diver. You were SO MUCH MORE than that. That wasn’t even really a big part of who you were. It was to them because they chose to only know one very small side of you. They probably didn’t even know that your favorite color was purple.

Who am I to even be saying these things? In comparison to others, we weren’t that close. I’d like to think we were, but I cannot say anything about how deeply I am hurt in comparison to your family or girlfriend. The point is, we are all hurting. We are all grieving. We are all acting out of character. One day, we will converge together again and be able to feel some resemblance of ourselves again. That will take some time.

I feel so much loss now, but I am gaining so much. I am gaining a new group of friends at my new job. I am gaining new connections. I am doing something you encouraged me to do. I applied for a scholarship opportunity for STEM Outreach. I was almost too nervous that I wasn’t good enough, and then I remembered you. You would have pushed me to do it. So, I applied. Life will give me new joys, but I won’t forget you.

I write these to document my progression of grief, for me and for others. I want others to know that they are not alone and that their feelings are valid. I want to normalize grief. You have no right to judge others for how they must grieve. Grief does not excuse mistreatment of others, poor behavior, or poor decisions. It does explain them, though. Be kind to those who are hurting. Be kind to yourself if you are grieving.

And most importantly, give yourself time.

You keep on living.

Note from the future: These are very raw descriptions of the grief I was feeling when one of my closest friends passed away. I wrote these as an avenue to grieve and to document grief. They are honest and mostly unfiltered. If anything I wrote hurt, offended, or upset you, please talk to me. Currently, I am in a much better place and I am at peace with the situation. Yes, it still hurts, but I am surviving.

“Pain… it demands to be felt.” - John Green

It’s been a little over a week since you passed. I’m in a better place now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still deeply miss you and that it doesn’t deeply hurt me.

It comes and goes in waves. Some days I am good. Some days I am bad. Some days I can barely bring myself to go into work. Some days I want to cry and can’t. I don’t know what is holding me back.

I miss you lot. Your absence is something I’ve had to just accept now, as hard as it is.

I don’t feel as alone as I did. People finally began to text me and talk to me. I received a call at the beginning of the week that put me on a high the whole day. And then another one yesterday. We talked about you. We talked about how sad we are, how great of a person you were. How much it hurts. How much life sucks and you have to just move on. That call meant the world to me. I feel less alone, but still a bit alone. I need a long hug from someone who actually knew you. A shoulder to cry on from someone I trust, someone who won’t judge me and will let me grieve how I need to and won’t tell me how I should feel or that I need to give everyone the benefit of a doubt. And for the record, I hate hugs. If I ask for one, it’s a dang national emergency. If I hear one more person say, “We’re fine over here, don’t worry about us, we’ve got each other,” I might scream. I’m not around anymore so the majority of people just forget I existed or that our friendship existed. That’s selfish of me, I know.

They are having a ceremony on Sunday for you. It will be beautiful: they are braiding the kelp we studied and placing flowers and little notes into it and then sending it out to sea on the beach where you and I learned how to dive in the ocean. It will be so lovely. I wish I could be there. They will place music for you. They will talk about how wonderful you were. How much we will miss you. I am sad I won’t be there. It tears me apart. It hurts so much, I just keep imagining it and I want so badly to be there for everyone and with everyone.

The idea is truly beautiful, but something still deeply upsets me. People cannot wrap their minds around the fact that you were more than just one thing. They just see you as a diver in our lab. They see you for the work you did. You were so much more than that, far more than that lab could ever make you out to be or could ever give you. I don’t want you to be remembered for that. I don’t want to people to think of you as “a good diver” full stop. You were so profoundly more than that. I resent that you never had the opportunity to get out of there and experience something outside of that place. Heck, you even told me after that lab, you didn’t think you would do much diving. “Not even for fun?” “Probably not. After this, I’ll probably be done with diving.” I think it grew more important to you towards the end and you started to enjoy it a little more (especially in Rapa Nui and after you got that Holis BCD), but you really didn’t love it as much as people make you out to. You probably wouldn’t be that brokenhearted about it, but it still hurts me to think that people want to close you off into a little box and make you into something that fits their narrative of you. I don’t want you to fit my narrative of you. I want you to fit your own.

The thing is that we can never truly know someone. We can get very close, but everyone is going to know a different side of you. If we all come together, we can piece you back together bit by bit, but we will never fully have you. That is why we will miss you so deeply. You will never truly be present with us again, not like you were when you were physically here.

I wish your efforts were more appreciated while you were still alive. I can’t help but be angry at some people for not valuing you. That’s just part of the process of grieving. I am so upset that you will never see the publication of our book. I’m sad about our paper, too, but that was in our hands, we were working on it. The book was out of our hands. I promise, I am getting that book out there with a dedication to you.

I told a friend that sometimes I have a hard time leaving the house. I’m scared that what happened to you will happen to me. Or that it will happen to someone else. “Life is fragile,” he said in response. It is. I just didn’t realize how fragile.

I wish I could cry. I did a little the other day. But I feel like I need to cry more. I feel like I need to cry for a solid hour and then some. It just won’t come out of me. When I left Chile, I sobbed for two hours in the airport. Once I stepped foot on that plane, I didn’t cry until three months later when I saw a video of a place I loved in Rapa Nui. It’s not that I don’t deeply miss Chile or you all or the sea or doing something I loved. It’s that I just physically can’t cry anymore. I’ve never wanted to cry more, and now I can’t and I feel horrible about it.

I feel like a crap person for how I’m grieving. I know that I can’t feel like that, you grieve how you are going to grieve. Some ugly feelings may come out and that’s ok, that’s normal. You just have to get past them and get them out to someone who gets it. Who won’t judge you or tell you how your supposed to feel. You aren’t supposed to feel any specific way when grieving, every feeling is fair game, every person is different, and every loss is different.

I miss you.

I started watching the new season of Stranger Things. You liked the show and would have watched it, and we would have talked about it. It wasn’t your favorite, but still, I thought of you. Not sure what you would have thought of it, I’m not even sure what I think of it. It’s… a bit too gross for my liking. But I still like the characters and the story line. You probably would have liked the special effects, you always said you enjoyed special effects in movies and tv.

The thing about life is that it is so unpredictable. Sometimes it pulls you up so high you think you’ll never come down. You’re so happy it radiates from you. Sometimes life pulls the rug out from under you and delivers the strongest blows and pushes you into the depths. Sometimes, you just feel a bit neutral. Life will always throw you curve balls, but you have to just keep living. You have to keep moving and hoping for greater things and reaching out to them. Life moves on even if you don’t. I will never “move on” from missing you. I will always miss you. But I will continue my life, just like you would have wanted. The world is sadder without you in it, but life can still have meaning. You were important and that doesn’t make you any less important, but I can’t stop seeking to help make the world better because I lost you. You would never want that.

You have to love the people that you love while they are still around. You have to take their photo, take a video of them, tell them they are important. Don’t just assume that they know because 90% of the time, they don’t. It’s up to you to let them know. It’s up to you to be kind and caring to people, to change our world by a few small acts of kindness. Text people to let them know you care about them. Call them sometimes, send them a photo that made you think of them, ANYTHING. Anything to let them know that someone on this dying rock remembers them enough to think of them sometimes. Don’t lose people while you still have them.

Life happens. Tragedies happen. You keep on living. You keep on living because you must. Because the world needs you in it. Because you are important.

The world is poorer without you, Joon. But I will make sure the world never forgets you, and I’ll try to keep moving forward with my life just like you taught me to. Even beyond the grave, you are teaching me. I love you for that.