I remember in 8th grade when I got my yearbook that someone scribbled out their own face because they didn't like how they looked and I remember being hit with a sense of... not quite dread or horror, but something along those lines and I remember calling out, almost desperately, "Hey! Don't do that!" and it wasn't because I liked that person more than anyone else, in fact, I hardly knew him, but I think I was afraid that if I were to ever look back in the yearbook, I wouldn't be able to remember him because his face was gone. Ironically, the fact that he even did that in the first place as stuck in my mind for a number of years and has caused me to question my way of thinking of the world, particularly my fear of forgetting those I care about and my past or being forgotten by them.
Nowadays, people take a lot of pictures of everything and with everyone, probably because of the easy accessibility of a camera through a smartphone, so images (and items, though not quite related to this) seem to mean a lot more to me than they do to others. Each picture tells not only a story, but reminds me of so so many things associated with them (my relationship with the people in the picture, what we were doing, why, how we even got to that point, maybe what happened after) and I'm not sure about others, but I take the time to appreciate that since I don't exactly have the greatest memory. Most pictures I have of my life are those taken by family or others because 1) I don't carry any image capturing device with me everywhere unless you count your hands, paper, and a pencil, and 2) I don't like taking pictures of myself and most things I would want to capture would have to be taken as video rather than a picture.
So, I don't have many pictures.
Those that I do have though are very important to me, especially if they contain people or things I know I'll never see again because they remind me of something I'll never be able to have again: My past.
All I have to remember my life and my friends and family are my crappy memory and extremely damageable snippets of our life, and once those are gone, there's no getting it back.
You can recreate scenarios and recreate pictures all you want, but those new images will hold different emotions and different memories than the original, they'll have memories of what led to the recreation. You can never perfectly recreate a moment which is something I'm constantly reminded of whenever I see old pictures of me and my friends. You can't return to what once was, you can meet the same people again, but they'll never be the same as back then and neither will you and, for some reason, that makes me cry. Probably because there are so many moments in my life that I've forgotten, only to remember them and cry from nostalgia.
Probably why I don't keep pictures of real people in my room.
I'd probably end up crying myself to sleep every night, lol.