"Smile for the picture! Scoot in on the left and those in the back need to bend down! Everyone has to fit!"

The timer starts and the woman rushes into her spot within the frame of the photograph. How many people can you fit in a four by six? You for your senior photos? Your two friends for a framed christmas present? Your whole family for your holiday card? Your entire graduating class for your graduation party invites?

There's this need, this desire, to capture life, to take these permanent snapshots of our lives in every moment. Remember the camping trip at six where you sang all night long? Here's the voice memos. What about those annual trips to the local carnival? Here's the ticket stubs. Oh and you can't forget your canoe trip senior year of high school because here's all those pebbles from inside your shoe.

There's only so much storage in our heads for all of these memories of all of these moments in our lives. You can only hold so many memories of birthdays, Christmases, family vacations, confessions, and inside jokes. Eventually, when we're old, gray, and wrinkled, we'll want to look back on these photographs and remember these moments as if we never forgot them.

And as you hang all those polaroids on the wall, pile all those photographs in a ribboned closed box, you realize this fear that's been consuming you. If we don't take a picture, the memory will be gone forever. And that can be true. Memories are like glass: the more time it spends in water, the cloudier it becomes. Photographs are those pieces of seaglass, little shards of mementos to remind you of a time so long ago. Each year a different color, each feeling a different shade. There's all those greens, whites, browns, blues, and reds. Here's one tainted pink, and here's a rare yellow one.

But instead of a ribboned box, you need a transparent jar so you can see every piece. So as that jar sits by your bedside as a reminder of the possibilities of tomorrow, you begin to sleep and dream of all of the moments that you never got to get mementos for, and you'll wake up wondering if it ever even happened. Because even though you desire to live in the moment, your sea glass collection grows bigger and bigger every day. And you realize that fear and desire mix hand in hand, both emotions causing you to find more and more glinting pieces of clouded colored glass.