The Art of Love and Memory
How memory keeping sustains us
My dear friend Emma and I had a weeklong sleepover when we were 13. The first night, we decided to make a homemade music video. We slathered our faces with garish makeup and pulled on random pieces of clothing from her closet and lip synced to Bad Romance by Lady Gaga with the frivolity you could only find in two teenagers in 2009.
I love looking back at this video. I can only describe that week spent with Emma as one of the silliest weeks of my life. I can still feel how my stomach hurt from laughing in between takes. I think of Emma whenever I drink a can of Diet Mt. Dew (at least 10 were consumed from the pop machine in her basement during the production of this video). We regularly talk about that week, the videos we made and the unfiltered fun we had. Our friends will periodically remind us of those videos, too.
I’ve spent nearly fifteen years taking photos and videos and giggling maniacally with my dear friend Emma. So it didn’t surprise me when I drove down to Kansas City last weekend to visit her and she pulled out a camcorder.
Emma is uprooting her life soon and moving to New York City, making the life that she has told me she wanted since we were 13. She bought the camcorder to record her last few months in the city she’s lived in since early high school.
“I want to make a catalog of home videos of these last few months, then I’ll get a different memory card for when I’m in New York City,” she told me. “I’m just trying to get the things happening around me to have for myself.”
As we left her apartment Friday night, Emma had the camcorder in her hand and her polaroid camera slung over her shoulder. I watched her watch her city through the lens, pointing at all she hoped to carry with her—her dear friend Suni making her a drink, the crowds outside the first bar she took me to on my bachelorette party months earlier. It reminded me of using my mom’s camcorder in the early aughts, seeing for the first time how a life could become meaning when it was observed.
“Everything was much more aesthetically pleasing back then,” she said. “Also, you didn’t have a camera on you at all times and you had limited film on the camera. The pictures and videos were taken with so much more care and intention.”
Emma comes from a large, close-knit family—her mom had four sisters and one brother. She’s incredibly close with her cousins and has five siblings herself. They are a family that loves hard, and she loves to look back at memories of how that love has grown over the years.
“I can and do spend hours with family photo albums and videos,” she said. “The way that technology moves forward, it makes me sad that this part of memory capture is lost. People aren’t going to go and watch the videos on their iPhone the way that we would watch old home videos. It’s not just the same.”
Emma understands the value of these memories more intimately than most. She lost her mom and a beloved aunt at a young age. These photos help her sustain her connection to these two women who were foundational to to the way she loves the people in her life.
“When I say I enjoy family photo albums, I’m not just looking for my own childhood pictures. A lot of my favorite ones are looking at pictures of my mom and her siblings and watching them all grow up,” she said.
I’ve seen many photos of Emma’s mom over the course of our friendship. She passed away before we met, but I see so much of Emma in her smile, know that she had the same boisterous laugh as her daughter. Studying these photos feels like a way for me to honor the loss that someone I love so deeply experienced.
Memory keeping is not something I’ve had to think about in this way for most of my life. I have been fortunate to experience very little loss thus far. That changed last August when my grandpa passed away from cancer the weekend of my bachelorette party, the last time Emma had taken me around her neighborhood in Kansas City.
My sister, my aunt Denise, and I went through photos of my grandpa later that week for the picture boards for his wake. We sorted these pictures not by the time periods of my grandpa’s life, but by the relationships that meant the most to him. His sisters and my grandma. Each of his three kids and their children. His brothers-in-law, his community involvement, his love of NASCAR and Iowa Hawkeye sports. A collage that told the life story of a man who gave freely and loved fully. A map of the man we all loved so dearly.
I realize now that Emma and I have a map of our friendship, too. From our first year as cabinmates at Camp Hertko Hollow to making videos until 4 am in her aunt and uncle’s basement to bar-hopping in Iowa City in our early 20s to her standing by my side when I got married last September. All linked together with with body-shaking laughter and heartbreaking tears and the most unconditional love I’ve ever known.
I had been considering how I wanted to approach an essay about Camp Hertko Hollow when I realized Emma’s and my friendship was the perfect vehicle to explain the power camp has. We have long known that we are two very different people on paper, an unlikely pairing for a friendship that would prove to last as long as it has. I drove to Kansas City to interview Emma about those differences and what role camp has played in building our relationship to what it is now.
Have you ever interviewed someone who has known you intimately for over half your life? You learn so much about the self you’re presenting to the world, like how I learned that Emma has always seen me as someone much more confident and sure of herself than I’ve ever felt. How she understands my heart in immeasurable ways.
Throughout our conversations, the way I understood our friendship began to shift. Because while we may have traveled vastly different paths in our lives and become taken with vastly different aesthetics, I realized we’ve loved each other so deeply because we value the same things in life: family, friendships, the way we give grace to those who are complexly human. We have a fundamental belief in love and home that has kept us coming back to one another for years and that I know will keep us coming back to one another forever.
This particular period of our lives, we are somehow both the most similar and most different we have ever been. Emma is moving to New York City and pursuing adventure while I make my life here in Des Moines with my husband, a short drive away from our families. She is taking risk and while I play it comfortable. She is upping the tempo of her life while I am slowing down.
But we are also finding ourselves at similar junctions in our creative lives. We each recommitted to our love of writing this year. We each have let go of wanting to be an artist and instead started living as one. Emma is journaling and writing essays and exploring her lifelong love of film through recording her own life. I am journaling and managing my Substack and building my creative network in ways I used to be terrified to build. We are learning more about our own perspectives, believing in our own abilities to have an artistic vision and committing to it. We are bringing creativity into every facet of our lives.
Big adventures await us, and I will look back at these memories with unending gratitude that my dear friend Emma was by my side through them all.
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Love this, Macey! Friendship like this is precious indeed.