It's been a long time...

... without you my friend

*cues music for Fast & Furious 7 song*

No but seriously, I was looking at my number of blogposts & was greatly saddened by how much they've dwindled. And I clicked on a few posts & felt so bittersweet reading comments left by people. I guess in a way this blog & all the people that gave me the time of the day to come see it & sometimes leave a note, are both strangers & friends to me.

Now it feels so surreal, surreal how my life was such an open book.

I posted such mundane, mundane things like where I ate & what I did & what I wore & whatever else. You can probably call it vapid, really. But at the same time it's quite heartening how it was so... 

... simple

Those were the days before content was so carefully curated. I did of course, still watch what I said back then because well, I'm not completely retarded, but when I shared things I didn't think so much about whether it was sufficiently aesthetically pleasing. It was... just sharing things. It didn't matter if my pictures were a little grainy or too underexposed. Pictures of food were just that, no careful arrangements & deliberated placed branded sunglasses, jewelry or wallets.

Then over time that became the norm.

People stopped caring less about what you said & more about what was nice to look at.

I too, started taking better pictures. I mean, that's a good thing.

I was finally putting my DSLR to some kind of use, beyond just the Auto mode.

But wow, churning out posts the way I used to became impossible.

And I've become a lot more guarded as an "online influencer".

The same way my peers have I suppose. I know close to nothing about most new bloggers these days. I have no idea how old they are, whether they work or study, if they have any siblings, pets...

So...

Hello! Here's a little news update about myself:

I'm currently seeing someone. Have been, for almost a year.

His name is Shaun & he is 5 years older than I am.

He's not adverse to online attention or anything like that, but I find it difficult to explain why I've become so private. 

I guess I feel a need to keep my public life as pristine as possible, as curated as every other Instagram feed out there. 

But that's not my life, it isn't pristine.

I didn't even realise, but I stopped taking pictures.

I know right? A blogger, who stopped taking pictures.

Shaun has brought it up a few times; that I never want to take pictures together. We've gone to so many places & done so many things together, but we can come back completely empty-handed, with nothing but memories. And it saddens him that after all this time, he has very little to look back on.

And I couldn't really justify it. All I can say is, I just somehow lost the habit. Without even realising it, I simply stopped. I used to carry a camera out with me every single day & I took pictures of anything & everything. Now, I lug out my heavy DSLR the whole day, just to capture 1 outfit picture for my Instagram. I've become someone who takes pictures only intended for posting online.

I used to capture everything & upload everything. Anything that wasn't uploaded was deleted. I have never kept pictures purely for the sake of just... keeping them. My form of reminiscing was Googling my own name & whatever occasion I intended to look for.

Now that I no longer blog (much), I still keep nothing. Because I have nothing to begin with.

I can't grapple with the idea of taking pictures just for them to rot in my computer.

I just somehow can't imagine taking pictures & having nothing to.. do with them.

So I stopped altogether.

But maybe I should slowly try to struggle to get that habit back?

So hey, here's a hugeass picture of us in Paris, at a fairly new attraction termed the "I Love You" wall where it's written in a multitude of different languages. It's located somewhere in the Montmartre area. Taken with my iPhone 6.