22/06/2026
We didn't take a hundred pictures of every night. We took one. Maybe.
One shot, on a disposable camera, with twenty-four exposures that had to last the entire month. You didn't waste them. You couldn't even SEE them until you dropped the camera at the drugstore and waited a week for them to come back, half of them blurry, somebody's thumb over the lens, three of them just darkness.
So most of those nights? There's no record. None. No photo, no video, no evidence at all.
And here's the thing nobody appreciates about that now:
We took our chances and trusted everyone to forget.
Whatever dumb thing you did at the party — whatever you said, however you danced, whoever you kissed, however badly you embarrassed yourself — there was no footage. It lived only in people's memories, and memories fade. By Monday, most of it was already going fuzzy. By the next month, it was gone. The whole thing just... dissolved, the way it was supposed to, the way nature intended.
You got to mess up and have it disappear. You got to be young and stupid and have the universe quietly forget on your behalf. Every embarrassing moment had a short shelf life, and then it was simply gone, freeing you up to make brand new mistakes the following weekend.
That's a kind of freedom kids today will never know. Every single moment now is captured, saved, posted, screenshotted, archived forever. Nothing fades. Nothing's forgotten. One bad night can follow you for years.
We trusted each other to forget.
And mostly, we did.
What a gift that was, and we didn't even know it.
To be young and forgettable.
To mess up and have it vanish by Monday.
I hope they get a little of that back someday.
