DEBÍ CONTAR MÁS HISTORIAS (I should have told more stories)

The question was: Which memory do you hold dearest?

At the time, all I could think of was this past New Year's Eve: when I spent it on a boat, in the middle of the ocean, being swallowed up by the fireworks and being kissed by a charming Chilean man.

 Honestly, my heart still races every time I remember it. I took hundreds of photos and videos of that moment; I never want to forget it. Two hours later, my cell phone was stolen. Today, I have videos and photos of other people, in which I happen to appear.

I was really upset to arrive back from my great adventure and have fewer photos to illustrate my stories. I thought that when I returned from my 32-day trip to Chile, all the people I knew would ask me lots of questions, like children who ask for stories and lie down to listen attentively with their little hands holding their chins, to the great explorer who had gone to unknown lands! That’s me. And as a good adventurer and storyteller, I would perform stunts and tricks while telling all the emotions, setbacks, and passions I experienced in the foreign land.

It was my dream.

The reality is quite different. A picture is worth a thousand words, and there goes my storytelling profession down the drain. In fact, that must be why Instagram Stories are called Stories, right? Nowadays, meeting in person has become expensive, everything is remote, and what we do now is post a carousel of pictures with any random phrase and hope for a ton of likes.

Even though I vividly remember seeing my relatives sitting with friends on couches, holding piles of paper, going through picture after picture, narrating details:

- This is where we had lunch (shows photo of the restaurant)

- That’s later, that's when my ice cream fell on the floor (shows photo of the ice cream)

- I already told you this, but what you'll see in the next picture is that my ice cream fell right on this guy's foot (shows picture of the guy) and we ended up at a nightclub (shows picture of what could have been a line of coke or a light from the nightclub – nobody asked.).

- We stayed there until dawn, and here's a photo of the sun rising...

That custom doesn't exist anymore. No one tells Stories, they just post Stories. And I don't want to post, I want to tell.

I've seen that little laugh of contained frustration more than once when I take out my beautiful iPhone to take a picture and a friend of mine says, “Send it to me later, okay?” I smile and nod, saying yes, but I almost always forget.

Mari is sweeter and says something like: Send it, girl, please, I know you take a long time to post! Now Pam is rougher and says: I don't know why you take pictures if you don't post anything!

Okay, but what's the point of posting? Can someone explain it to me? What's the point of all those photos without context, without words, without life, with a staged pose, and that level of curation?

I don't take pictures to post, I take pictures to record the things I experience, the things I see, the things I feel, the urban chaos... Posting is just a consequence. In my favorite photo from this last carnival, I’m not even in it! I take pictures because one day I might forget all of this. I take pictures because before we could take pictures, people told stories only with the details they remembered, their notes, and some drawings. I know that we are being filmed and photographed full-time in the big city, and that even against my will, my life is being recorded all the time. The good side of this is that I do have pictures and videos from New Year's Ev,e even though I didn't take them. The bad side is that sometimes we lose a bit of the magic of having so much of this.

Stories aren't stories, so who do you tell ours to?