- 09 Dec, 2025 *
The age difference between me and my youngest male cousin from my mother’s side is almost 8 years. Looking at "8" as a single digit number, it may seem like a small gap, but our recent trip to my mom’s hometown, and my birthplace, made me realise how far it actually is. Not too much that I’ve built a family in the middle of it, but far enough that I’ve lived a different life from him.
From left to right, my aunt's memorabilia, my not-so-baby cousin, me and my mom in our birthplace
While visiting ou…
- 09 Dec, 2025 *
The age difference between me and my youngest male cousin from my mother’s side is almost 8 years. Looking at "8" as a single digit number, it may seem like a small gap, but our recent trip to my mom’s hometown, and my birthplace, made me realise how far it actually is. Not too much that I’ve built a family in the middle of it, but far enough that I’ve lived a different life from him.
From left to right, my aunt's memorabilia, my not-so-baby cousin, me and my mom in our birthplace
While visiting our ancestral house where almost all of us cousins lived at some point in our lives, we had this crazy idea to look at all the photo albums and look at our old photos.
It started when I opened a cabinet that my aunt forbade me to open when I was a kid. Now that I’m well into adulthood and my aunt no longer lives in the ancestral house, I thought it was a good idea to walk down memory lane.
The cabinet was filled with my aunt’s most treasured memories during her years abroad. There were letters, pamphlets, loads of photo albums, and books, some even in Arabic. She worked in Jordan for I would think at least a decade.
All of the photos were of her in the late ’80s to the early 2000s. It got us wondering about all the other photos in the house, so we started digging more.
We opened another cabinet, one that was open to everyone, and there, we found photo albums from our other aunt and her years in Saudi and Hong Kong. 70% of the cabinet were dedicated to her photo albums. The other 30 were of our parents and our grandparents.
We saw some photos of me and the cousins my age in the albums, but my cousin noticed he wasn’t in any of them. He wasn’t born yet when we had the "photoshoot" stage.
I was in 2nd grade when he was born, and by the time he was able to make memories of his own, we’ve had a lot of memories of ours, too.
We scoured through cabinet number 2 and found none. He said he was curious to see if we’d found any because he hasn’t seen much baby photos of him, even in their home.
We continued looking. Et voilà, on cabinet 3, we found a baby photo of him, but unfortunately, it was of our grandmother’s funeral which he, of course, have no memory of.
He wasn’t too expressive, but he did notice the drastic change. He used to be chubby, but his metabolism caught up, now he’s slim.
I told him he should dig through every corner of their house. He is the first born of their family, and I am well aware how much my aunt loves taking photos, so I know there is a collection of some of his baby photos. He, however, is a nursing student now, and I know how hectic that could be. Hopefully he can find some during the Christmas break.
I do adore nostalgia, even the heavier feeling it sometimes leaves, and the regrets that may follow. Old photos would always remind me of how far we’ve come, and how good life can be in the next unknown.