KashiaExplores: Tales of Discovery

The one thing I have lost and still long to recover are the photographs from my many trips to Spain with my former partner. There were so many of them—snapshots of adventure, of wind in my hair as I skimmed the water on a windsurf in Safaga, Egypt; sunlight and laughter; two people who once believed in forever. They carried the weight of nine years together, the imprint of our youth, of finding each other, of learning who we were—together—and the faint outline of who I once was.

They vanished in 2017, the year our lives began to drift apart. He flew to Cape Town; I to India—each of us seeking distance in our own way. His laptop, holding the archive of our shared past, was packed into his checked luggage. Somewhere over the equator, the hard drive was smashed. With it went every photograph, every frozen second of our story—along with my own images from my student years, the first hitchhiking trips, fragments of a life I was still learning to inhabit. I had stored them on his computer after mine broke. I never bought a new one. There was no backup, no cloud, no second chance.

Those files had held our world: the trip to Rome where he proposed, and the horse-drawn carriage waiting outside the Colosseum. I remember bargaining with the driver, refusing his absurd price of one hundred euros for a ride I didn’t even want, while Will smiled, mistaking my irritation for playfulness. I didn’t know what was about to unfold in the next few minutes. There were photographs from Zakopane, where I hiked through a fever, wrapped in a blue jumper that read Mi hermana—a souvenir from my first trip to Spain with my once-lost friend José. And Barcelona, with Kaya—who drank too much, locked us out of the Airbnb I had booked and paid for, and laughed about it later.

There were also the photographs from Greece, taken during a holiday with his university friend Mat—the man who never forgave me for an impatient remark and made sure I remembered it. I still see that car ride along the coast: Mat’s girlfriend driving while he mocked women behind the wheel. I told him to stop, called him a chauvinistic pig. Will said nothing. Later, he pulled me aside and asked me to apologize.
“For calling him a pig?” I asked. “Or for calling out his chauvinism?”
“For the word pig,” he said quietly.

I sat in the back seat, hidden behind sunglasses, silent tears slipping down my face, wondering why I was with someone whose silence always outweighed my voice.

Those photographs are gone now—the good moments and the bad, the bright Mediterranean days and the uneasy silences. Perhaps that’s how memory works: it keeps what it must and lets the rest dissolve. Yet sometimes I think that if I write about them—if I give the stories form—the images might return. Not to my eyes, but to the part of me that still remembers what it felt like to be there.