Senior Picture

"-What are you working on?"

"-A display print, somebody's senior picture I think..."

"-She's pretty..."

"-Senior pictures sure aren't what they used to be..."

She looks like her mother. The hair, the ever-so-slight olive hue in her skin tone. Those eyes; soft brown irises; looking straight into your soul, the way her mother's did. Her mouth: kind, gentle, with a bit of an overbite and a natural half-pucker. As was her mother's.

The summer of love. We had met at work the previous winter and had sort of gravitated towards each other. By May we were together, but come September we were not. When I left her, her eyes were still soft, but her lips had turned down, into a quiver. There was only one last desperate phone call, and then that was the end of it.

Now this. Returning in another guise, staring straight into the camera as if to say to me: "Why did you leave me? Weren't my lips enough? My eyes? My beautiful skin that you once caressed? I gave you everything I had but it still wasn't enough for you, was it? Look at me. I'm not angry, I just don't understand why you left. I don't understand."

Of course the girl in the picture isn't our child. It was thirty-seven years ago, not seventeen. And conceiving a child with her tied tubes was not physically possible. But the girl in the picture did look an awful lot like the woman I loved once.

"...She looks like someone I once knew... or someone I thought I knew..."