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With my left hand, I am holding a picture of a dragonfly I took during a school trip to an insect museum.

I don’t remember neither the location nor the exact year. For sure, that was during Primary School. I must have been between eight and ten years old. 

The Dragonfly picture is a 6x4 printout, the paper is glossy and thick. It is still in a good shape. Unfortunately, I cannot find the film’s stripes containing that picture. 

Only two more photographs survived from that film roll. The first one is a portrait of my classmate Boccino – taken in the hotel room where we were staying; the other is a snapshot of my friend Pamela and I sitting close together on the homebound coach. 

There is another picture from that trip that often comes to my mind: a gigantic plastic cricket. Despite the subject being completely out of focus, I remember being so in love with that photograph. For years, I kept moving it from school journal to school journal, until - without ever realising – I lost touch with it. 

Like toys, some photographs become seemingly too ‘childish’ when you grow into a teenager. And so, becoming one, I brushed out of my room all those pictures embodying old memories and – possessed by the future – I jumped into the new digital era, where the PC was king. 

Today, a ‘grown-up’ that I am, I dig into dusty boxes looking for my old toys. Maybe, one day, I am going find the gigantic plastic cricket again.