I spent the summer doing stupid things with my friends. We weren’t young any more but we weren’t exactly old. We were somewhere in the middle, which is a strange place to be if you’ve never been there. Some of us are married but none of us have kids. A few of us own houses but most of us rent. We have fashionable jobs we pretend to like but deep down wish we could quit: in fashion, finance, advertising, sports marketing. The bills pile up and everyone we know has a credit card debt and school loans. Plus, New York isn’t getting any cheaper and everyone around me kept saying I needed to worry about the future.
For a few days the future didn’t matter, or that was what we told ourselves. We fucked around, drinking and smoking, swimming and sleeping, acting like children, even though we knew that we weren’t. The idea of Summer Vacation has been engraved in our minds ever since first grade and it’s getting harder and harder to accept that one day soon it will all be over. We’ll go our separate ways, living our separate lives, connected only by holiday cards, the internet and nostalgia.
Videos by VICE
So I kept taking photos. Me, the most frightened of them all, with the worst memory and the greatest propensity for failure. I wanted to exist in the world my camera allowed me to create; somehow life seemed more meaningful that way. Even if it is just an illusion, at least it is mine to keep until the photos fade or are put into storage to make room for the baby.
Follow Atisha on instagram: @atishapaulson
