You have your social Self and then your social media. Your face and then your Facebooks. Your profiles then your prof pics. Everyone lives a double life: the one you see and the one you stalk.
There is the side people see out with you … the wild, dirty, messy, sometimes ugly person you are when you are just being you. Then there is the cyber you.
The cool, hot, always-smiling and having-a-great-time you.
The one who is always at concerts, parties and fabulous fashion shows. You are looking great, in a fabulous outfit with fabulous people around you.
You have done so many cool things. Look, you have the fotos to prove it.
That is great for you. You definitely made some people jealous, definitely created a life others might even admire.
But those pictures do not compare to the moments you shared secretly and intimately with a select few.
Your fake life does not compare to your real one, the one that people will never know or be able to ‘like’.
You do not have the moment you ran into Alec Baldwin on the street and shook his hand. No, just you and him hold that moment, no proof.
You do not have the pictures of those original moments when you were just living. Those ones with your friends, laughing over something you will not remember in an hour.
The moments you forgot to take a photo and just enjoyed it the way it was meant to be: unfocused.
You remember the feeling of the concert, not how close you were to the stage. You remember the rush of the music, not the sound quality you get on your phone.
You remember the energy around you, not the perfect selfie you took.
Every time you do that, every time you take seconds or minutes to create the perfect reenactment of your experience, you are actually taking away from it.
You are taking away from the bigger picture, the raw moment and trying to make it something.
Remember that night. You know the one. That one you can not remember anything about, yet you can still feel everything. The night you can really only remember by feelings you had during it.
That feeling of happiness, a contentment you had not felt in a while. And Love. You remember feeling all this Love.
This all-consuming adoration you had for your friends, your life and that moment you can hardly remember.
Those nights you shared with your best friends, or your family or those friends who became family while abroad.
Those long days that turned into nights, strolling through parks, cities and just feeling so damn happy to be alive.
You go back there a lot. You revert to the time and the place, letting it settle in your mind, letting the feelings of that night flood over you.
You see moments, flashing and fleeting, and faces of people you once loved, now Love or still Love.
You remember those feelings the way you remember a birth or a wedding. They are intense, and all-consuming.
You will live 20 years and still feel the weight of them. Those emotions still come rushing back, filling your body, even if the images do not.
There are no photos, videos or digitized tokens from that night. You can not soar back to it with a simple glance of a photo or Facebook link to a video you are praying to God you are not in. They are memories that were not published or clicked on.
There is just you and the vague recollection of a great time. It is something just you and your friends can try to recall, only when you are together, bringing it up and revisiting those feelings all over again.
You can not see the time or the place, but you remember the laughter and the fun you were having. You remember the Love you had for each other, and that Love comes back.
That is what makes these moments so special, because moments that have not been digitized and missed because of some technology, are rare.
That is 150 times you stopped looking around and just looked down. It is 150 times you refused to be part of the moment, and removed yourself to digitize it. That is 150 times out of a small window of 24 hours that you missed a moment.
More than 500 million photos are shared every day, with that figure expected to double in the next year. That is 500 million times people stopped having an experience to document one.
That 500 million times throughout the day that we took ourselves out of the moment and refused to live in it.
Tha tis 500 million pictures of experiences we are not really having. That is why those moments you are not recalling through a photograph or scrolling past on Facebook are the ones you remember the best.
The best memories you hold, the ones that will stay with you for the rest of your life and relieve you in your darkest moments are not ones you can recall through a photograph or relive through a video.
They are the ones you can not really remember, can not sift through our iCloud or send to friends. They are the ones that you lived, experienced and refused to take a second away to try and store for later.
The moments you can not run through on your Facebook feed are the ones you want to keep with you. There is no such thing as the captured moment, only a frozen one.
Only ones where you have stopped being part of the moment and instead become part of a memory; it became a stolen shot.
They are the pictures, videos and tweets that take us out of the moment and prevent the memory from every really forming.
The average person checks his device around nine times an hour. Checking it almost every six seconds during evening hours, some people unlock their phones over 900 times over an 18-hour period.
It is the moments you did not stop to take out your phone or Go Pro. It is the time you actually danced to the music rather than stood there filming.
They are the moments you did not stop to take a picture, making your friends turn around or judging the aesthetic rather than appreciating it.
Maybe you can not remember it clearly now, can not see it clearly, but you can feel it.