Youth Center Kids

I found an old photograph the other day, one I hadn't seen, hadn't even thought of, for years. I was looking through a box of books that I haven't looked into since moving from my father's house three years ago. I picked up a copy of "Watership Down", blew the dust off the cover, and opened it up. As I flipped idly through the pages, deciding whether it would go on the shelf or back in the box, the photo fell out. 1

There we were, the youth center kids. Looking so much younger than I remember ever being. There, with the breeze wrapping our too large thrift-store clothes against our too skinny bodies. There, with our too long or too short (never quite right) hair blowing back from faces with too many angles, too many shadows. Smiling faces, though. Underfed, tired, pale, with our future frown lines already beginning to show, but smiling just the same.2

I think often of that time. Sometimes, usually when I'm lying awake in bed, seventeen is so close, only yesterday. Other times, I find it hard to believe that any of it ever happened. Those memories seem more like an old movie I watched once, or maybe a story I heard about a friend of a friend of a friend's sister. I think about those days, and those kids, and the lives they lived; and it seems so strange to think they were us.