What you found on my SD card

When in Rome, Lose Your Mom’s Camera

00.

All my life, I have been a collector of memories. No matter how futile, I grasp at them as if I can concretize them. Under the umbrella of my youth, long before I was exposed to social media or scrapbooking, I fed this urge using my mom’s camera.

It was the smallest box under the Christmas tree that year. With its glossy, vermillion casing and orange flotation wristlet, it was an eyesore in every definition of the word…and I loved it.

I would make that camera mine. Forever.

That was, before you stole it.

01.

April 16, 2016

Rome, Italy

Eighth grade field trip

This was the first time I relinquished control of my mom’s camera.

The true mark of a Catholic school survivor is the field trips that one recalls. We did the usual stuff too. We went to Space Camp to learn about the Cold War and Washington D.C. to also learn about the Cold War…we did a lot of geopolitics.

But as elementary and middle school ticked on, we all geared up for the Big Trip. Our school’s Magnum Opus. The Big Kahuna.

The Eighth Grade Rome Trip.

In my adolescent turbulence, I had planned on begging and pleading with my mother to let me bring the camera. Unbeknownst to 14-year-old me but overwhelmingly clear to my adult self, she was pleased to have documentation of the trip. Whether it was for her benefit or mine I am not sure, but I happily click, click, clicked my way through Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, and the Colosseum. No architectural site or museum was safe from my keen photographic eye.

If only I had downloaded any of the pictures.

Instead, I saved the ones I knew my mom hadn’t seen. She had her own formative trip to Rome and in the vast scale of the human endeavor, not many artifacts had changed. What she hadn’t seen, though, was me perched on the Tiber River with my best friends since kindergarten.

During a free moment, we dumped our bags on our chaperone and gingerly inched along the graffitied concrete bridge for some alone time. Our debrief was necessary: the day before, my middle school boyfriend had held my hand for the first time! For fifteen whole minutes! The three of us kicked our feet and talked about what it meant to like like somebody as we breathed in cigarette-scented air that was delightfully foreign. I wanted to saturate my lungs with the feeling of being in Rome. With nothing but our friends in reach, I took stock of every fleeting thought, hoping to immortalize the sensation.

All the while, my chaperone was click, click, clicking away with the camera I was afraid to bring to the water’s edge. She captured the first and last candids I have of myself from that camera.

Funnily enough, the pictures don’t do justice to the memory.

02.

June 20, 2019

Rome, Georgia

Governor’s Honors Program

This was the last photo I saved from the camera. I was in a careless rush about it too, jamming the SD card into the disk drive of my dinosaur laptop while scarfing down a suspicious dining hall dinner with all the naive excitement of a seventeen-year-old living at college.

Pictured are Laura and me at GHP, the last memory I have from that little red camera. The discussion topic at hand: platonic soulmates. I had gravitated toward a group of tortured poets and writers that had their heyday on Tumblr, and small talk could so easily snowball into nuanced tête-à-têtes that we all got FOMO when we had to part ways to our gendered dorms for the evening.

A week after I took this photo, we would sign up for an astronomy field trip. In the meantime, I had obsessively stockpiled every happy moment into the arsenal that was my camera roll.

Before heading to the pasture, our badges were checked and roll was called. The lineup and headcount always felt penitential, but us eager little ducklings had long since become used to the control. So eager that I trusted a stranger in the crowd to hold my camera.

When the passalong camera game began, I should have been worried.

But I was present. All I knew is that Laura, my fast friends, and I were nestled together in a dewy pasture, the grass as high as our thighs, straining our eyes and necks toward the starry heavens.

The less I try to record my history, the more involved I become.

03.

I would love to end with an instructional message about my dual “Romes” – how these trips were a Roman Empire I would cherish, SD card downloaded or not. It is true that I remember our astronomy field trip even more without the camera to remind me, but I can’t help but think… man, I wish I had that picture of us looking for Orion’s Belt.

So I guess the moral of the story is…

If you’re going to steal a kid’s camera, at least leave the SD card.

(Sorry about the camera, Mom).

Strike Out,

CG Sigman

Editor: Grace Maneein

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