Posing for pictures

During the summer I hatch out of my cocoon and become a social butterfly. At the beginning of quarantine, when I was in my cocoon, I was both happy and stressed about not seeing anyone. While constantly shaking my leg and not being able to sit still, I looked back at what I had done before the quarantine.

During the summer, I was constantly making plans with a group of “friends” I had. We would spend all our time either at the beach or going to parties, sometimes having fun, sometimes rolling our eyes while having “fun”. Taking pictures all the time to post on social media so that everyone would know what we were doing. We truly felt like we were living the teenage life we had seen everywhere on social media and on television. The life where you have a close friend group and you’re constantly going on adventures.

At that time I thought that I was going to be moving from Perú. Spending time with other people and making memories was my way of dealing with the uncertain future. When I spent time with my friends I would forget everything. When my friends and I weren’t together I would look at all the videos and images of when we were together. We had such good group chemistry, constantly laughing and smiling, we would always want to be together, during good and bad times. We would always be laughing and taking pictures or videos of us at parties or around Lima, even at the beach. We would go everywhere together.

Sometimes, we would actually be having fun in those pictures; sometimes we would just pose for those pictures. I remember one specific time, during the middle of the summer, we were at a party on the beach and there were cool lights, one of my friends wanted a group picture there. The boys of my group didn’t want to take them and some girls didn’t either, we just wanted to enjoy the party. But because we loved our friend we posed for them, although for her the pictures just didn’t look good, they were not natural enough (obviously not, we were posing) or it didn’t look like we were having enough fun (obviously. We wanted to hang out, not model for pictures) She got annoyed and frustrated until she had the picture, we all were.

Even after the picture our mood and vibe was off because we were all so annoyed at each other for those dumb pictures. We spent the rest of the night pretending like we were having so much fun. By then I felt like the spark my group once had was dying out because we were all forcing ourselves to hang out every day and pose and pose and pose.

I remember waking up the next morning and seeing on everyone’s Instagram stories those pictures we posed for, they were all pretending like they were natural images of us caught off guard where we were just having fun and being the “close friend group” we were. Deep down we all knew we really weren’t having fun, instead, we were posing so that we could post on social media.

More and more times we found ourselves pretending to have fun rather than actually having fun as we did at the beginning of summer. More and more, we would fake for pictures to post them on social media, to pretend we were living the teenage life we had seen idolized everywhere from everyone.

But at the end of summer when we would all go back to our different schools and not be able to see each other daily we weren’t really sad, although we were still a little sad. We were all just so tired of posing for pictures to pretend like we were having fun all the time. We stopped talking for a couple of months because we were all just so tired of each other. It’s not that we didn’t like each other, instead we just all felt pressured to pose because that is what we had seen everywhere. Eventually, the pressure was too much for us to handle and we started disliking each other. That made me sad because we did have fun times but they became more scattered.

But then during the beginning of quarantine, we started talking again, not as often though. When we talked it reminded us about how at the beginning of summer we were really close friends for a reason because we wouldn’t pose. Why did we feel pressured to pose so much then? What happened?