The Internet Can Wait Thirty Seconds

The sunset was being annoyingly perfect. Pink sky. Sea doing the sparkly thing. My hair cooperating for once. And I was furious because my reel hadn’t saved.

Everyone else was watching the sky. I was staring at a storage notification and considering legal action against my phone. At some point, “Let me capture this” had quietly become “This doesn’t count until I capture it.”

 

Coffee wasn’t coffee until I had filmed the pour. A new outfit needed photographic evidence. My friends learnt to pause halfway through laughing because “Wait, do that again” had become a perfectly normal sentence. I would return home with proof that I’d had a lovely day and very little memory of actually being inside it.

 

I love creating. I still reach for my camera when the light looks good, someone says something funny or my food arrives looking more emotionally stable than I am. The camera isn’t the villain here. But when every nice moment starts arriving with a shot list, joy begins to feel suspiciously like unpaid production.

So I made a few tiny rules. The first bite is mine. If my friends laugh and I miss it, I miss it. Nobody has to recreate happiness for the B-roll. And if a sunset disappears before I can film it, there will be other sunsets. Probably. The sky has been fairly consistent so far.

 

I still take too many pictures. Let’s not stage a recovery montage!I’ve just stopped asking every moment to prove it happened before I let it matter.

 

Strangely, the content got better too. Less arranged. More lived in. The memory gets the first draft now, the internet can have the edit.