This year, I dedicated the drizzly, flat little days between Christmas and New Year to having a clearout. I felt an intangible lightness with each book, old birthday card or defunct gadget that passed out of the door and into a new home. In my late teens I nurtured a habit of taking amateur snapshots on film –and it’s taken me until now to make peace with the fact that I would never actually process decade-old, under-exposed negatives into anything, and throw them away. But there was one contact sheet that made me pause – not because I wanted to preserve it, but because it directed me to a memory too poignant to remember: my 27th birthday.
The photos, in tiny thumbnail form, reminded me that we threw a party at the flat I was living in at the time and I wore a short black dress. Friends gathered on the balcony and stood in a line up to lift me up, sideways against their bodies. It should have been indistinguishable from any other contact sheet in the box – people who didn’t realise how young and beautiful they were, relationships that were no longer intact, cans on kitchen worktops. But this slip of paper brought with it a reminder of the piercing loneliness I’d felt in my 20s, something I’ve since come to realise but have rarely had to probe.
