What I Didn't Photograph

Little Joys Vol. 4: On presence, unrecorded moments, and the magic of merging timelines.

I didn’t take a single photograph. I just couldn’t.

Council Crest was full that Friday evening in July. Blankets spread across the lawn. A couple clearly on a date, a bottle of wine between them. A group of twenty-somethings with a deck of cards. Someone playing hacky sack. A few people stretched flat on their backs, watching the sky.

And I didn’t see a single phone.

Not one. Every blanket, every little cluster of people, was completely present in the moment as it was unfolding. No one distractedly scrolling. No one witnessing their own evening through a lens instead of living inside it. It wasn’t going to be me who broke the spell.

Council Crest sits above Portland, a park with views that still, after all this time, make my insides come alive. I discovered it in 1996 and it has almost always been quiet there, nearly empty, mine in the way certain places become yours simply because you keep showing up. I’d never seen it like this. Full, and somehow more peaceful for it.

I had every intention of documenting the evening. Doing some joy noticing of my own. But I couldn’t lift my phone. It felt sacrilegious… So I just meandered quietly and let it be exactly what it was. Unrecorded. Unperformed. Mine only in memory.

And now yours, too.

It wasn’t until I got home a few days later, standing over my first load of post-vacation laundry, wondering where my creative spark had gone, that I understood what had actually happened to me on that hill.

I’d felt flat since I got back. Like a balloon with all the air let out. Exhausted, mostly in the good way, but exhausted all the same. For a few days I kept waiting for the spark to come back. Checking too often. Willing it along. Then I wondered if I had it backwards. Maybe the stillness wasn’t a lack of inspiration at all. Maybe it was my system catching up to the experience. The spark hadn’t left. It was resting. Catching up, the same way I was.

I discovered that park in 1996, and a perfect summer evening in 2026 handed 1996 back to me. Not as nostalgia. As proof. Proof that some things survive the passing of time. Proof that people are still capable of presence, even now, even with pocket computers making their case for our attention every ten minutes of every single day. The world hasn’t fully eaten itself.

I discovered Council Crest when I was seventeen, the year I moved to Portland. I’d grown up homeschooled in a tiny town in the high desert of Colorado, arid and small and known in the way small towns are known, every corner of it already mapped in my head. Portland cracked open something, the whole city felt like The Secret Garden. It was the feeling of pushing through a door and finding a world that was lush and alive and, somehow, waiting just for me.

Standing at Council Crest that Friday evening in July, I fell through a kind of vortex. Not back to 1996 exactly. But back to the feeling of 1996. Back to a version of the world that still had mystery in it, and people who weren’t somewhere else in their heads.

I read a lot of dual-timeline novels and time travel stories, the kind that move between a character’s past and present. I think what these books are actually about, underneath the plot, is the self that existed in a previous timeline becoming suddenly, shockingly accessible again. Past versions of ourselves rarely disappear. They just wait, patiently, at Council Crest on a summer evening, until you find your way back .

And the magic lies in the merging of timelines.

That’s what happened for me, anyway. I didn’t just remember 1996 me. I merged with her, for a few minutes, on that lawn. The seventeen-year-old who arrived in a new city with eyes like saucers and a heart that hadn’t been told yet to be careful. She was standing right there with me. Not as a ghost. Not as something I’d lost. As a resource.

Young Aj’s hope wasn’t naive. A homeschooled kid from a tiny Colorado town, moving to a new city and finding undiluted magic around every corner—she wasn’t being foolish. She was in the early stages of practicing the exact thing I now spend all my time immersed in. Joy noticing. Presence. Choosing to shine a light on what’s in front of me instead of scrolling past it.

I think that’s what the deflated-balloon feeling was actually about, this week. It wasn’t emptiness. It was room being made. A full life, even a good one, needs somewhere to put everything it just experienced. To sit with it before it gets filed away.

So here’s what I’m leaving you with, the same question I’ve been asking myself since returning home: what version of yourself is waiting somewhere specific, on a particular evening, for you to come find? Not a metaphorical somewhere. An actual place. A porch, a trailhead, a kitchen that isn’t yours anymore, a park you haven’t been back to in years.

It’s likely that version of you hasn’t gone anywhere. They are simply waiting for the right evening, and for you to leave your phone in your pocket long enough to go find them.

P.S. If you want the dual-timeline novel rabbit hole, start with Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow or Emma Brodie’s Into the Blue. Neither one is really about time travel.