Mallorca 2019.
I don’t remember the how or why, but I guess I had some time off and booked a short vacation, no more than an extended weekend, for myself.
I enjoyed my solitude back then as I do now, but I do remember feeling somewhat lonely on this trip.

Sitting in a bar texting my girlfriends, hoping someone would talk to me, but realizing that I’m just not very approachable, and I also don’t like talking to people all that much. But I may not have known that about myself back then.

Sitting in a pizza restaurant, because the vegan place I wanted to eat at was closed, and eating the one plant based pizza they had there, unfortunately the kind with the cheese that sticks to the roof of your mouth like hot glue.
Everyone looking at me for approval, and me having to finish the whole thing to not hurt their feelings.
I remember an older man, perhaps the owner, giving my shoulder a little squeeze when he could see I needed it the most.
How I love the small but intimate kindnesses we can share as strangers.

I remember the one person trying to initiate conversation with me was the creepy dude in the bunk bed next to mine in the mixed dormitory hostel. I remember shutting him down and being amazed at how transparent he was, pretending not to care and putting on a whole embarrassing act. I didn’t sleep well, with the dude being right there and the bunk bed being almost comically high above the ground, but it was cheap and they were always playing music I liked in the reception.

But mostly I remember loving traveling alone, making plans with myself, not having to check in with anyone.
Walking for hours and hours, maybe with a destination in mind, but with the time and space to indulge in all the detours and distractions that popped up along the way.
Stopping for the fanciest coffees I could find every couple of hours.
Going on a bus ride up a mountain, feeling like I was the terrified main character in a 80’s movie, you know, the kind where they’re going up a steep, winding mountain path somewhere in like, South America, in a bus that seems too old to even be in service, and they look out the window and some rocks fall into a bottomless canyon below and they’re sure they’re gonna die? That was me.
But the ticket was less than 5€ and I called my mom from a mountain top to share the moment with someone, and I successfully avoided the other tourists, and had a wonderful day of going where I wasn’t supposed to and taking in the views and mainly, capturing those views with my camera.

My camera.
A camera I have neglected recently, and by recently I sadly mean for a few years now.
Sad because I love photography and I love this camera, and I find it almost a little frightening that you can love something so much, and still just… stop doing it?
Like forgetting to check in with an old friend or relative and suddenly it’s been too long.
It feels like a cautionary tale.
Don’t do that.

Some months ago, or more likely over a year, I went to my old photo place on Karl-Marx-Straße, where I had been getting my photos developed for years, to drop off some film.
The shop isn’t particularly good, but I had a weird sense of loyalty towards the place, and the cigar puffing elderly men who run it, and it brought me a sense of comfort too, I suppose.
The kind of comfort you get from being reminded of an older version of yourself that you liked, and feel nostalgic about?
In my case, a more cartoonish, skinnier, shinier version of Flora who had pink hair and carried around an old analog Canon camera and a small dog, and who wrote and painted and blogged and romanticized feeling lost.
Well, not-quite-that-person-anymore went back to this old haunt of hers and asked for the usual (“photos on a CD, bitte”) and somehow didn’t get that the first time. Just negatives in a paper folder.
The second time, after some complaining, she got a CD, but when she came home, she found out it was blank.
There was no third time.
Loyalty only goes so far.

Following those failed attempts was a long period of time where a paper folder with some negatives and a blank CD sat on a shelf in my home, while I developed an increasingly powerful mental block towards doing anything about it.
I get those a lot. Big things, small things. Even things I want to do, or things that are urgent.
When the block comes, there’s no telling when the thing will be done.
But eventually I did, do something about it. At a different shop, for obvious reasons.
And of course it was easier than I had made it out to be in my mind.
My pictures via WeTransfer? What a world!
And while I still feel like an idiot for not getting these four (yes, that many) films developed sooner, there is something magical about being given secret memories from your own past like that.
Some going back as far as 2016!
More on those later.

First time travel trip goes to Mallorca.