I’ve Been Looking So Long at These Pictures of Me

I show you pictures of a teenage me, and instead of commenting on the height of my bangs or the short of my skirt, your lips form a perfect circle as you oooh and aaahh over a much thinner version of me.  The silence between us is a net, and into it the last twenty years of my accomplishments fall like bricks.

I have a picture of myself that I took with a real, physical camera.  I’m alone in my apartment after my divorce.  Behind me, a lamp glows against the bare white walls.  I am in a tomb.  I wear a fake tan and a tense smile.  The suggestion of the wrong man and the promise of a better one.

In our wedding picture, I lean against my new husband with a belly full of our babies. My neck is thick and my smile wraps around the world a million and a half times.