{ Red Light District | Phuket, Thailand }
A few years ago, somewhere between moving from Hell’s Kitchen to the Upper East Side and then moving again to Tarrytown, the little camera cards holding all the photos and videos from our honeymoon went missing. We looked everywhere, but ended up trying to cultivate a “well, the memories are more important anyway” attitude about the loss. Which is, of course, true.
Still, though.
It kind of sucked.
Before I started doing this “blogging” thing, Kendrick and I never took a ton of photos; I only really have a handful from the first few years of our relationship. One major exception, of course, was our honeymoon: we went to Bangkok, Phuket, and Bali, and took a billion pictures with my little point-and-shoot. Most of them were of the terribly out-of-focus variety, and Kendrick basically spent those two weeks earning a doctorate in Dad Photos (which is my term for those “artistic” close-ups of things like flowers and stonework and animals that people take on their vacations thinking that one day they will deeply desire documentation of a lizard that looks like every single other photo of a lizard that has ever been taken, except worse because you were the one who took it as opposed to the National Geographic guy).
On this trip, we also took videos. Not “for” anyone – which is kind of funny to imagine, given the fact that nowadays, when I pick up a video camera, at least part of my brain is often (not always) thinking about the fact that it may end up posted to the Internet for other people to see. In the videos I take these days, I try to be something approaching coherent, and hopefully even entertaining. But the videos we took on our honeymoon weren’t even intended to be seen by our families; they were just for us.
They were also (or maybe “thus”) poorly shot and kind of ridiculous – Kendrick, for example, did really a lot of videotaping of my boobs under the guise of “Hey that’s what husbands do when they’re on their honeymoon with their new wives. …Right?” We took video after video of things like monkeys and the ocean and our hotel lobby. We made one video in which we followed the impossibly long, winding pool that traveled around and around the grounds of our hotel in Phuket. It was as scintillating as it sounds.
But there was also this one video that Kendrick took from our balcony while I was swimming around in a rainstorm. In it he zoomed in on me from far away, watching me diving around in the waves and shivering, and he said to the camera, “Kids, your mom is beautiful.” He was speaking to our children: the children that we – really only kids ourselves, just barely married and unsure of everything, including each other – hadn’t even begun to imagine. Those children are here now, sleeping in bed beside me right this very moment, and in that video, taken years before they existed at all, their dad told them that he thought their mom was beautiful.
The photos, you know: eh. We had posted a bunch of them to Facebook when we got back from our trip; we have those, at least. But I always kind of wished we hadn’t lost those videos.
And then, last night, guess what Kendrick found?
Just to be clear: this video is utter crap. It’s crazy-pixelated, and silly, and we’re being performative and weird because we weren’t used to filming and apparently couldn’t act like normal human beings when a camera was turned on us…but it’s also a document of the moment in our life when we realized that the rest of it was going to be spent together. And I’m so, so happy we have it back.
More found shots after the jump, because why not.
{ Two and a half days into a flight across the world you get really, really weird. }
{ One of my absolute favorite parts of the trip: getting lost in Bangkok and trying to figure out how to get back home again. It took us hours. It was worth it. }
{ Hi, I am twelve years old. }
{ Here is Kendrick being nervous. }
{ Me on a tuk-tuk in Bangkok, clearly thinking I am very alluring and mysterious. }
{ This elephant tried to launch us into a spiderweb the size of Texas, complete with Texas-sized spider. We started out buddies, but I did not like him very much after that. }
{ In this photo we have just finished a hike through the rainforest. }
{ I have leeches on my butt – two, to be exact – but do not yet know this, which is why this is a photo of me looking happy rather than a photo of me losing my mind. }
{ To this day, I am very serious about my pool-playing. }
{ Above: the aftermath of a not-especially-minor run-in between a jet-ski and Kendrick’s face. )You can tell I’ve been crying here because for real: it was terrifying. But he was fine. Extremely fine, actually, because apparently Phuket painkillers are the shit.) }
{ I was pretty sure this monkey was going to eat me. }
{ Oh look! It’s people on their honeymoon, eating breakfast and asking the waiter to take their photo! }
{ In Bali, we took a painting class for two. The paintings we made are hanging in Indy’s room right now. }
{ This photo is only in here because Kendrick is wearing a fanny pack. }
{ This shot – taken on our last night in Bali – is a terrible photo. It’s blurry, and weirdly spotty, and Kendrick looks inexplicably furious. And yet I completely love it, because how this night ended was with a walk through the pitch-black rainforest with only candles and each other for company. }
{ And finally: here is one of my favorite photos ever. It was taken outside a beach bar in Phuket: we were sitting at a little rattan table drinking beers, and all of a sudden it started pouring so hard that it felt like the ocean was falling from the sky. And so I put down my drink, stood up, and ran out into the water, just because. }
{ I’ll remember the way I felt that day for the rest of my life no matter what, but I’m still glad this photo found its way back to us. }
