Forgetting past passages and retracing them on Facebook

by Bonnie Wertheim

photo illustration by Grace Molteni

When I was 15, my family traveled to Iceland, but I hardly remember it. Some scenes I can summon: searching for a restaurant in Reykjavik that would prepare chicken parmigiana for my fish-intolerant palate; trying to pronounce street names phonetically with my brother; and lying back in my cot, reading the last Harry Potter book. After page-turning obsessively in the backseat of our rental car, at the bases of waterfalls and glaciers I can only assume were breathtaking, and by lamplight before bed, I made it to the all-too-neat ending of the series before anyone could spoil it. What I didn’t realize was that, in choosing a fictional journey over a real one, I’d lost sight of the last vacation my family would take for a long time.

We don’t have many pictures to remember Iceland by, aside from some show-off shots my brother took while testing out the DSLR he’d purchased just before the trip. These photos don’t so much resemble memories as ads; a picture of our Ford Fusion covered in mud, for instance, wouldn’t look out-of-place between two features in a glossy magazine. His pictures tell a story of an epic excursion anyone might have taken; neither my family members nor locals appear in the photos. The absence of humanity in these images corresponds to the scattered mental map I have of Reykjavik: I can’t see myself there.

***

Just two months before Iceland, I went on a teen tour through Western Canada. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a supervised trip for travelers of a certain age. My fellow teens and I had entered high school the year before the trip. It was 2007, when Facebook still restricted its user base, and high school networks allowed new members to join on an invitation-only basis. Most, if not all, of us were approaching our one-year anniversary with the social network.

The relative novelty of Facebook might explain why a huge portion of my timeline is taken up by moments from this trip. I alone uploaded 110 photos, and I’m tagged in at least that many. There are photos of me doing things as worthy of capturing as white-water rafting in Alberta and as stupid as making penis jokes with my natural surroundings. There are group shots of us line dancing and trying to camouflage ourselves against graphic murals. There are so many point-and-shoot selfies, and every caption is an inside joke. To be 15 is to ascribe meaning to all you can see.

In these photos, my hair is as long as it will likely ever be. The hairdresser who had cut and combed knots out of my locks since I was an infant moved to Las Vegas in 2006, and I refused to trust anyone else with such an essential part of my identity. So the curls grew and started to hang loosely like never before. Sure, the ends were split, and showering took at least an hour, but I looked so confident. You’d never guess that two years earlier, I’d spent most nights attached to a straightening iron.

Maybe I was just starting to realize my power. So many primary experiences marked that summer. It was the first one in a decade that didn’t consist of days spent making friendship bracelets before swimming lessons. Instead, I slept in the woods for about a month, even though I’d never camped before. I had my first kiss that summer on a lazy river in British Columbia — a maneuver that must have been precarious but sits in my memory as perfect. What followed in that weeklong relationship was less so; a few days after our kiss, the same boy touched me in a way that made me feel, for the first time, that my body had been violated.

The big events act as tent poles for the summer, but the minutiae are no less lucid. If I spend enough time looking through the Facebook albums, I find myself once again on the winding two-lane road where I watched my driver pass the car ahead of us, certain we’d die. I can recall the intimacy I felt with Clare after a hike where we fell behind the pack and told each other everything — about our families and the harshness of high school and the crushes we knew would never love us. Even moments as mundane as mulling over a $50 Roots sweatshirt feel so close. There’s no way to say this without sounding like a social-media evangelist, but I’m sure it has everything to do with Facebook.

***

By the time I was on a plane across the pond for a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, during my junior year of college, I had every means of reaching people at my fingertips. Even though I’d put my Verizon Wireless account on hold before the trip, my data-disabled iPhone 4 was always on me and in use as often as I could find a café with Wi-Fi. I’d downloaded Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Voxer before my flight, so I could contact my faraway connections whenever our schedules overlapped. Furthermore, my phone was my camera, a duality now commonplace. Its lens bore witness to four months that were fun at times, but mostly difficult.

Facebook tells a partial story. It opens with the stuff most study-abroad students experience during week one: guided tours, grocery-store culture shock, and fast friends. When we start exploring Edinburgh’s nightlife, the photos become proxies for lived experiences. The only evidence that remains of a night that was probably fun is a photo of an orange paint smear across the seat of my pants (I trashed the stained cords with a pair of Vans I also destroyed). Pictures of me and my friends getting ready for evenings out figure more concretely in my memory than the nights themselves, probably because most evenings went undocumented after we left our flats for pubs and clubs. The days are clearer. There are high-resolution photos of us taken at high tea and on sheep farms and hiking up Arthur’s Seat and boating through Loch Ness. Yet their content fails to form an original narrative. We could have been any Americans spending a semester in Scotland.

When I stop scrolling, shut my laptop, and just try to remember, the images that return range from unremarkable to Facebook-unfriendly: tossing chopped iceberg lettuce with a single sliced Roma tomato and not only calling it a salad but also dinner; sleeping in a McDonald’s after missing the last train from Glasgow; sitting on the curb at 2 a.m. sharing fries with curry sauce for the second time that week and feeling not a drop of shame or fear; losing each other at the Hive, the only club in the city where there wasn’t ever cell-phone service; and crying over Skype to people far away. These moments, though true to my time away, were of course never caught on camera. They went mostly unseen and weren’t worth sharing.

I’m certain the Canada photos were for us, but the Edinburgh photos were for everyone else. Most of us hadn’t ever spent more than a week off the continent, and it showed. I can’t think of anyone who’d budgeted living expenses on the pound, which made for a lot of panicked calls home about money. No one knew how to cook for one, or convert grams to cups. We weren’t prepared for the tampons in Europe, which are decidedly different. But the pictures we shared signaled to anyone who saw them: We’re okay. Now more than ever, the way we document our travels seems to take this shape. We send Snapchats from locations we might never again visit, digital postcards set to expire in 10 seconds or less. We post Instagrams that provide little context but make our experiences look controlled. The act of capturing isn’t as much about remembering as it is about performing okayness. I’m okay enough to plate this brunch. I’m okay enough to appreciate nature. I’m okay enough to stay out until 3 a.m. I’m okay enough to fake it.

 

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Bonnie Wertheim is a New York-based writer and editor. 

Grace Molteni is a Midwest born and raised designer, illustrator, and self-proclaimed bibliophile, currently calling Chicago home. For more musings, work, or just to say hey check her out on Instagram or at her personal website.