Swinging the door open into my room into MIQ was a resounding relief, after two of the most mentally challenging and draining weeks of my life, I was now presented with a constant - this room, three meals a day, two outside sessions a day, thats it.
My plan to get all of my developing equipment to MIQ had gone smoothly - on the third day we were delivered our personal bags, the same day I had arranged for my developing chemical to arrive, and the following day, for the scanner to be dropped off.
Taking photos on film is always a bit of a gamble - relying on a chemical emulsion to be stable, capture your photos, remain stable and preserve those photos over time is a gamble. Let alone when the time comes to open the film up (in a light proof environment), and expose it to the correct chemical at the correct temperature for the correct amount of time to hopefully yield the photo as you recalled it. Once thats all done theres drying, cleaning, scanning (don't get fingerprints or dust on the negatives), correcting, cropping, matching, and then we get to arrange the book.
The day I developed the images was also the day of my friend, and team mate Olivias funeral. We learnt of Olivias passing as we arrived at the airport in Narita on the way home, hence the relief of arriving at that MIQ room some 30hrs later. Watching the funeral of someone you love, and seeing groups of people on the other side of a fence all of whom all you want to do is hug, is something I don't wish upon anyone. After sitting in my room for a while after the funeral, I went for a walk in our outside time, sharing love from a 2m distance with my team mates and those friends on the other side of the fence. I got back to my room, ate, and decided to develop the photos.
It felt weird doing something as fulfilling and gratifying on a day that was clouded in grief and loss. I didn't want to push the day aside, I just wanted to do this thing, and let my emotions for the day settle. I'm so glad I did - as I went through each roll, i'd ebb-and-flow to being completely immersed, to going back to the day, and so on. I clipped the rolls up in the bathroom for the night, and left them to dry.
I don't know how long it took me to get to the part where I began arranging the images. It must've taken five or six day to process through it all, to the point where I had categorised folders of each roll ready to put together into a book. Looking back through messages with my partner Lizzi, whom I was constantly barraging with design ideas, and formatting concepts and excited screenshots of scanning loading pages, I began forming ideas on the book as soon as I had the negatives, and by the time I had each photo processed, the book fell smoothly into place in a matter of days.