Memories are fleeting. That's the one thing I come to realize the older I get. I used to hate taking photos because I hated looking at myself and I never knew what to do in front of the camera. My mom always told me that I would regret it but I always told her that I would lock these memories up in my head and if I forgot them I would simply have to make new memories. Better memories. Well my head feels more like a sieve than a safe now. And I'm starting to view memories as one would look at fine wine, you can't just make better ones, they get better over time. Over 15 years ago, I was on a family vacation cruise in the Bahamas. The under 18's had its own play centre so we wouldn't be upset over all the bingo gambling that was going on around us. It was a crazy group of kids, and my sensibilities didn't quite match up with most of them, but I did make one friend. Her name was Fallon. We stayed in touch and she became my first email pen pal ever. Over the course of the next few years the frequency of the emails slowly grew further apart, until our lives changed, we moved on to other things, and my hotmail account was so full of neopets spam email that I stopped using it altogether. This morning I was having breakfast with some friends and the name Fallon came up. I was struck at the nostalgia that that name induced in me. I decided to log into my old hotmail account to dig up some of those old emails, only to find that due to inactivity and the switch to outlook, everything was wiped clean. My mom was right. I do regret it. I have no photos to prove that I was on that cruise. No emails to prove that I had ever stayed in contact with Fallon. Only fading memories. And that just makes me wonder if she was even real or whether it was all just a fabrication of my imagination. A kid who just wanted to go back to school to tell people that he had made a new friend. Regardless of how it all actually went down, this is still a precious memory from my childhood. So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whoever you're doing it with, I hope you're well Fallon. Today someone was thinking of you.