I always come back to this picture every time I plumb down to a detrimental state of mind, because it reminds me of the fact I could genuinely smile. Bizarre as it may sound, I forgot how to smile from the bottom of my heart in these two decades. It's quite ironic to think that babyhood is the happiest moment of my life, and the afterward is only downhill. As always, they say don't look at the past, move on, and look forward. But things aren't easy like that. 'Perspectivism' hasn't functioned well in my train of thought for a long time.
Hence my unconscious desire to search for the remnant of my happiest days out of the album. The babyhood memory is so vibrant in my head. However, my joyous time is forever fossilized there as I started to socialize myself at school at the age 6. I don't find any photos capturing me smiling naturally throughout the course of my life ever since then. Even today, my heart is still numb. The voidness of my memories in an evident form will sometimes make me feel as if I have been alienated from a circle of people who enjoy their social lives and a large number of opportunities to make these experiences photographed.
In hindsight, however, what is more depressing is my latent proclivity to photograph everything for the sake of leaving the mnemonic token of my experiences in a 'materializing' way. Or it's rather a manifest impulse of mine to redeem my own 'lost decades' while I attempt to efface those melancholic, and often traumatic memories. Photographs reify the presence of good memories. At the same time, the absence of an image construction as such will implicitly testify one's unintended wishes to conceal her tragic and burdensome aspect of the personal history. Once taken, a photograph is an actual representation of our good memories. Unless taken, however, it alludes at the possible existence of our agonizing and nauseous memories.
