01

When I was sixteen, I secretly liked a boy in my class. It was just before the high school entrance examination and we were about to separate. I wanted to give him a gift as a souvenir. .

But I was worried about what gift to give because I had no money at the time and couldn't afford anything expensive. After thinking about it, I decided to give him a photo of me.

The next evening, I entered the door of the photo studio. The owner of the photo studio is a middle-aged man with poor aesthetics, so he painted me a bright red lip makeup. So, I wore an exaggerated red lip, a red short-breasted cheongsam with a Republican style, held an oil paper umbrella, and took four photos against a simple background. Prices were extremely low at that time, and the total cost of makeup, costumes, props, and the development of four photos was only twenty yuan.

There are no photo editing tools in the small village photo studio. The photo is your true appearance. Although the makeup artist’s makeup skills are a little worse, when I went to pick up the photo a few days later, I was still fascinated by the look in the photo. The graceful and slender girl was very satisfied.

The night I got the photo, under the dim light, I carefully wrote a line of extremely official but extremely sincere blessing text on the back of the photo with a pen. "TO so-and-so, I wish you a bright future and great achievements."

He is a boy with excellent grades in the class, and there are many girls who secretly like him. The next morning I pretended to borrow a reference book from him, then stuck the photo in the book, and returned the book that afternoon while holding back my pounding heartbeat.

I anxiously speculated about what happened to him after receiving the photo, and I tossed and turned at night and fell into insomnia. However, the mind of youth is mostly an active and lonely one-man show. When he saw me the next day, he didn't have much reaction. He just smiled and said "thank you".

02

In the youthful years of fluttering white clothes, the saddest and happiest thing is undoubtedly graduation. Graduation is a carnival mixed with sadness, the beginning of everyone going their separate ways, and a memorial to their youth mixed with tears and laughter.

When graduating from high school, it is popular in schools to fill in a graduation guest book and post a photo or headshot next to your message in the book. At that time, I wrote many blessings with tears in my eyes and posted many photos. I also have two thick guest books. If I look through them at leisure, I can find countless touches and lamentations.

In the guest book, there are personal information of nearly a hundred classmates, including blood type, hobbies, idols, phone numbers, addresses, etc.; there are also messages in different writing styles, the ones with wild handwriting are written by naughty boys. , the handwriting is beautiful, written by a quiet girl, but the blessings are all equally affectionate, recording the years of friendship that exudes the fragrance of malt.

Those photos are also strange in shape. Some are artistic photos taken in a photo studio, some are funny life photos, and there are also small photo stickers with beautiful backgrounds. The fresh faces are childish and innocent, as if their school days are before their eyes, but their youth is irreversible.

When I was young at that time, I always felt that good friends meant each other’s life. But now that I think about it, that kind of friendship is wishful thinking and naivety. Many friends from my childhood have long since lost contact. Occasionally they meet on WeChat, and apart from simple greetings, they don’t say much. What is even more sad is that the world has changed, and there are actually several old friends among middle school classmates who can no longer be together in this life due to accidents such as car accidents and diseases. It is also sad to think about it.

When I graduated from college, it was no longer popular to write a guest book, so we took many, many photos as a commemoration. At that time, I thought that with mobile phones, QQ, and WeChat, the distance between us was only a plane ticket, so there was no need to be too sad about the separation.

But we have all forgotten that geographical distance is not a problem, but living distance is the biggest culprit that kills friendship. Some people just leave after they break up, even if they retain the acquaintance of likes. Because everyone has different life trajectories, and the same language is becoming increasingly rare. When we occasionally get together, we can only reminisce about the past, but we cannot watch the future together.

Fortunately, there are still photos, yours, mine, hers. The beauty and excitement of youth are all intact in that yellowed photo album, recording the clouds and clouds in the good years. Flowers bloom and fall. When you are sad and upset, you occasionally look through it, only to find that in this noisy world, you still have such an innocent and pure secret garden.

03

When my mother celebrated her birthday the year before last, my sister gave her an extremely precious gift - a 12-inch photo album. The photo album is very thick and full of photos. Some of these photos were taken with mobile phones, some were taken with cameras, some were images of family gatherings, and some were souvenirs of outings.

My mother likes this photo album very much. No matter day or night, she often holds it in her hand and rubs it over and over again, treating it like a treasure.

Growing up is cruel, and for parents, this cruelty is filled with joy and sadness. Children are like swallows, from being young to leaving the nest, it is their destiny. Everyone has their own difficulties, as do children, and so do parents.

My parents are now the most ordinary couple among the many left-behind elderly people in rural areas. My sister and I can only go home once a month. Most of the time, the two of them depend on each other and live a simple life.

It’s sad to think about it. The family that was once full of laughter and liveliness is now just two people smiling at each other. The loneliness in this is self-evident. When my mother is bored, she likes to put on her spectacles and look through old photos, and points out to her father with interest, "This is a photo taken during the trip that year" and "This is what my daughter looked like when she was five years old."

In fact, I am still lonely, but since I have that photo album, my parents can lean together when they are lonely and recall the joy and bustle of the past for comfort. For parents, money is really not the most important thing. Spending more time with them is the greatest filial piety in the world.

We are always used to making beautiful selfies or recording daily growth images for our children, but rarely can we take a few photos for our parents and make a photo album.

If you are interested, please prepare a precious gift for your parents. Even if it is a simple photo album, if it is filled with strong family ties, they will regard it as a treasure and treasure it for a lifetime. Because what you send is not a photo, but your fullest love for your parents.

04

Nowadays, I don’t like to use my mobile phone to take pictures. For one thing, the pixels of my mobile phone are really not high. When I upload the photos to my computer and print them, the effect is always unsatisfactory. Yes, Erze can't help but use various photo editing tools to beautify herself. She is beautiful, but in the end, she loses her true appearance. Sometimes at first glance, she almost doesn't recognize herself.

Although I don’t have any photography skills and the photos taken with the camera are not amazing, I like this reality. I am used to sorting out the photos every month and then developing them into tangible photos. I am used to carefully putting the photos into albums one by one according to time, scene, background color, etc., and then taking them out when I have free time. Read page after page.

Not long ago, I met a boy I once liked in a WeChat group, and I couldn’t help but mention the gift of photos back then. He took photos of me back then and sent them to me. It was as if I suddenly traveled through a time tunnel and returned to the summer when I was sixteen, as if I could smell the fragrance of gardenias on campus.

The photo from that year is really silly, with artificial looks, unattractive postures, and innocent expressions, but this photo is really precious because it represents a wonderful or embarrassing moment in my youth. The moment cannot be taken away by time, nor can it be erased by years. The moment is frozen into eternity.

Most people probably no longer have the habit of printing photos except for wedding photos. But I still stubbornly believe that the pictures on the phone are just pictures, and only the ones that are really clipped into the album are photos. So over the past few years, my photo albums have been piled up in a high pile, which can comfort the loneliness and appreciate the joys and sorrows, which is really good.

Recently, a friend went to Japan for three years on a public assignment. She came to say goodbye to me and had a good chat over wine, but after we left, she still felt that it was not enough. She felt that the banquet, drinking, singing and hugging were not enough to express my friendship.

Suddenly it occurred to me that it would be better to give her a photo of me. This is the best gift I can give her. Wish that thousands of miles away in a foreign country, every time she sees the photos, all she can think of is the warmth of her hometown and the warmth of longing.