an archive of nothing

There are no photos of the night my dog died. No record of me sitting on the floor with Oliver's head resting in my lap. I could've taken a picture; my phone was right there.

Every day when I log onto Instagram, I scroll through dozens and dozens of stories and posts – a birthday party, a cliché-looking sunset, another Scarsdale student at the Din Tai Fung in NYC. Carefully curated highlights, moments plucked from life and framed just right.

People take pictures to hold onto things – proof that something happened, that they were there, that they existed in a certain way at a certain time. But it's quite interesting to think about what people don't take photos of.

The funny thing is, if someone tried to piece together any one person's life using only his/her camera roll, they'd get it all wrong.

They'd see the same things posted on Instagram – vacations and staged candids, big meals and perfectly angled coffee cups, loud concert videos and golden-hour selfies. But they wouldn't see the moments that were too big for a lens, too sacred to be frozen in pixels. Some experiences demand to be lived, not documented.

Grief rarely gets documented. Death, goodbyes, the times when we sit in silence with someone who is hurting – those aren't things we reach for our phones to capture. Maybe because they feel too raw or maybe because we don't want to remember them that way.

Conversations aren't normally photographed, especially seemingly casual ones. I don't have a picture of my friend and me on the night we stayed up talking about the future and the version of ourselves we were anxious to become.

These moments slip by unphotographed not because they aren't significant but because we don't think about documenting them until they've already passed. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe some things are meant to exist only in memory – where they're softer; blurrier; untouched by the sharpness of digital permanence. Perhaps photos are just placeholders for the things we're afraid of forgetting, but the truth is, the things that matter – the things that really change us – are impossible to forget.

When I think about Oliver now, I don't need a photo to remember him. I can imagine the warmth of his fur under my hand or the weight of his head against my leg. A picture would have just been something to look at. But this is something I can close my eyes and still see.