It really did feel like a painting.
The delicately airbrushed clouds could have been pulled directly from a Van Gogh painting, and the ocean of a city punctuated the horizon, only interrupted by tiered mountains that were treated as a pesky interruption in the endless world.
A sky studded with marbled sapphires, grids of life chiseled from cinder and tin, houses flushed lime and apricot, the angelic sculpture of La Virgen del Panecillo jolting from the top of a flat-topped hill somewhere galaxies below—the scene is perfect, and all it needs is an artist to preserve the perfect beauty for eternity.
This picture was taken on the top of the Cruz Loma viewpoint above the city of Quito, Ecuador. By photo, it is nothing short of picturesque.
And although the moment was ethereal in real life, the untold exposition and action thrive outside of the picture frame.
The glimpse of a moment, a wink of a second summarized in the picture, doesn’t capture the eight hours we would spend stuck in the airport before our flight left that night or the detour we took that day to avoid piles of flaming tires that were lit in the middle of the road by protesters.
The picture doesn’t capture the seasickness that plagued my friends as we skidded across the choppy seas in the South Pacific Ocean, paralyzed with cold and soaking with rain. It fails to seize the sheer exhaustion I felt the next day after being out of the country for a week with a group of my classmates and waking up before the sun numerous days in a row.
For me, seeing has always been believing, and if I saw a picture of a girl with her head in the clouds, I would instantly be consumed by a pang of jealousy for the experience she got to have. My mind would immediately conclude that her life is all about soaring, and though it might have been for a moment, gravity eventually brought her down, and she was forced to retreat to land.
Outside of the frame was a cluster of chaotic memories, all patched together with photos, inside jokes, and bittersweet recollections. A memory, at its core, is always somewhat bittersweet: I am always aware that the moment will never be relived but also content that it happened.
A photo may be a memory, but a memory is hardly a life.
My camera roll is filled with hundreds of snapshots of life from that trip to Quito, eternalizing the moments and preserving the color, vibrance, and happiness that I worry will dull in my mind over time.
The pictures serve as joyful memories that I reflect on occasionally. If I lined up each photo next to each other in a golden frame, the exhibit would be worthy of a spot in an art gallery, pulling moments from the good, the bad, and the ugly that I managed to capture.
It would be a stunning display. Framed photos of the Andes Mountains that encompass the city would line my exhibit, along with other abstract moments I snapped while riding the buses, interactions with baby seals, and peering out over seascapes of the crystalline ocean.
But it would lack the spontaneity that real life holds. The moments that exist undocumented, left only to memory and those who cherish them.
