#l35af2

📸 Nikon L35af2

I lived in Boston many, many years ago. Actually, strike that; I lived there, yes, but that city chastened me like no other city has, showed me just how much I had to learn about life and love and then it tossed me aside and kept moving. It is, as they say, the truth. So I had brief residency there as the city pretty much rewired my brain and taught me in its way how to be an adult.

No, I’m not from there, but like many young strivers (or maybe drifters is more apt) I found myself drawn into its scruffy borders after college by its magnetic pull of what we can call ‘hipness,’ a cultural bounty in the form of a real, vibrant music community and relative affordability. And, at that time, I still wasn’t confident enough for New York. I had no stated plan for my life at the time other than the low bar of wanting to flee the south and maybe get to a place where the Confederate flag wasn’t still a common topic of conversation in bars and cafes, which it still was in the state.

That time in Boston was so long ago now -- yet deceptive in that maybe some days it doesn’t always feel so distant -- that it was a different lifetime ago, and for a variety of reasons, it’s a moment I don’t find myself reminiscing on all that much, no matter how beautiful and weird and imperfect and thrilling those few brief years were. For starters, I was pretty destitute in my early twenties and, just being honest here, I maybe wasn’t a really great human being with a huge conscience. I can admit it now. This embarrassment alone is enough to keep me from digging back into that time all that much. The only thing keeping me afloat financially in the beginning was temping at one of the colleges there while I worked on racking up freelance writing gigs, which as you might imagine, wasn’t easy for an outsider with few to no contacts in the city’s media community. No, I didn’t have to move there, but I needed to see where I could swim and if I could swim at all.

And I was still pretty green and fairly unskilled, so I had that working against me, too. It was tough living a lot of the time, but thankfully there were a million kids dressed in black, there was dancing into the wee hours of the morning and cheap beer, both of which can be a real balm for the financially strapped and romantically restless. Most weeks, it was a whole lot of looking into my wallet and finding that little more than a single dollar was staring back at me, but it was also a lot of laughing and doing dumb stuff with all kinds of new people.

One time, the money was so tight when I first moved to the city from South Carolina, I found myself furtively eating some of the food belonging to my roommates. Yeah...not great, because they really didn’t have much more than I did, and we weren’t really even friends. They hated me, and for good reason. Then they kicked me out, which was no doubt the right decision.

But I also met a lot of great people, people who remain essential to me now, and mercifully, my financial situation back then did balance itself out gradually. And then more valleys and then some peaks, but that’s life, right?

So why mention this time that I barely reflect on? ‘What’s the point of this banal overview,’ you may be wondering?

Well, the answer is simple, really: I did this thing last week, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it (Pretty much the real story of my life, truth be told). I took out my new Nikon One Touch (a really fun little point and shoot from the eighties, it turns out) for a spin, and without realizing it, I loaded it up with a used roll of film that I’d somehow preserved for at least fifteen years. This roll has lasted multiple moves and states. I don’t know how it happened; I do know that I had some old rolls in the back of my fridge, and apparently I grabbed one near some of the fresh rolls of Portra 160. In the roll went, I took pictures as per usual and out came something old (and new) that took my breath away.

And what came out were these pretty incredible double exposure images from two completely different periods of my life. What do you even call this phenomenon? Is there even a name for it? It was shocking to see smeared flashes of Boston in these pictures mixed in with things I saw on the street last week: Views of Somerville roads from old windows I’d forgotten about, a birthday cake from 2003, an old red bedroom and a drive along the highway all blended together with the neon Russ and Daughters sign (taken last weekend on my way to see ‘Paterson’) or a New York subway.

Film is pretty beautiful and forgiving in that way, right? It allows you to do something foolish like shoot over a roll you’d already used well over a decade ago and then make the whole thing look beautiful and haunting. I wish I could say I planned it all along, but yeah...not the case.