Photo Evidence

I miss the days before Facebook and before everyone had a cellphone camera. I feel now as if every aspect of my life has the possibility of being documented. Gone are the days of being able to do stupid things and get away with them. I feel it should be a right to throw up into my own handbag and answer to no one but the three friends that have accompanied me on this particular evening.

I worry that one day there will be a mutiny of my former roommates and all of the unsavory photos of me brewing kitchen wine in my underwear (it stains and I prefer to be half in the bag when I do such things anyway) will be seen by the entirety of my friends and family.

At a girlfriend’s birthday a little while ago many drinks were had, photos were taken (I can be seen in a few ducking behind friends and making unimpressed faces) which were then dispatched to my parents, via the birthday girl. I had thought we were friends, but now I am suspicious.

My mother had then called me to ask how I was doing; though I suspect she already knew. I was already laying on the bathroom floor, I really didn’t feel like discussing the nature of cause and effect with my mother. As I tried to get off the phone before I really did something to let onto the state I was in, she scrolled through photos in Hawaii, asking me if I’d managed to keep down breakfast (I hadn’t even tried).

What I mean to say is how can anyone get away with anything anymore, and why are we so okay with so much of our lives being publicized? I’m glad that I managed to get through the bulk of my teen years before social media became such a thing as it is today (mum and dad never needed to find out about my habits of spray painting farm animals or shooting fireworks at my friends, though I imagine that somewhere out there, there is a polaroid waiting to surface). For those people who post about their progress of doing laundry on a Friday night, their current mental state and their cheating exes I have to wonder why they have no stake in their own privacy.

It’s too easy to find strangers too. I’m still trying to shake off guys that I dated a long time ago. One found me on an app I’d been using to call long distance while I was in Sweden. I had been in the middle of asking the bartender about her tattoo—a Kurt-Russel-Escape-From-New-York inspired snake that curled around her midsection—when his name flashed up. As unwelcome as a rash.

I feel almost like my life has become a deposition, that I now have to admit to my parents about everything, lest they come across that photo of me riding an ostrich or sneaking into cordoned off areas in France. It is now almost impossible to ask permission for all of the things you are about to do, which is why I spend so much time begging forgiveness.

I suspect that so one from our generation will ever be able to become a politician. One photo of you cupping the two-dimensional breast on a Hilary Clinton cut-out is all it takes for you to be out on your ass as a speech-writer. So what of a body-painted shot at a full moon party? Though I suppose if Trump gets in all bets are off on that.  

I wonder about the possibility about any sort of private life and whether that’s going to be possible. It makes me kind of upset that I can’t just go out with friends and have a good time, that I need to worry about other people seeing what I’m up to, and for that I curb my enthusiasm, ducking behind a shoulder in the photo, worrying about what my mother might think.

Under the bridge. Bratislava, Slovakia 2015