I slowed the car to a stop on the single lane road and emerged onto the preserved lawn of statuesque tombs. The nostalgia of the old road and the sun filled breeze of my youth caressed my soul. The world around me continued to change, but this quiet place, under the towering bypasses of the living city of my birth, had yet to be graced by the coarse reality of time. As if my feet knew the path by heart, I followed my memories to the place that induced the harshness of the world upon me.
Reaching into the bag slung across my body, I pull out a small thin book. Flipping it open, pictures of memories long past flutter in the plastic sleeves. I stop at the photo of a couple posing at a table decorated with a plastic tablecloth, confetti and a group of small tea candles. Both are formally dressed in matching shades of purple, including corsages, each a gift from the other. Snapped with a disposable camera, the flash overly saturates the background while the couple sit in shadows.
I didn’t understand then what I knew now. This photo of their senior prom would be the last time our friend group would be together. The memory of this photo lay forgotten till I found the little book amongst some old boxes. As I flipped through it, this simple photo hit the hardest. The last photo of Jenny and her boyfriend together.
Back in high school, when I dabbled in the affairs of assumed maturity, I found myself within a friend group of older students. Insignificant nothings brought insurmountable emotions in a world too small to hold them, as our notions of ourselves expanded. Cold winter descended as we all soon faced the realities of death and unfulfilled life. Friends surrounded each other when the grief crushed what remained of our strength as we collapsed at the news.
Jenny was gone.
The funeral came to help form our last goodbyes, but no words came from us. What more could be said about a beautiful person who now rested in a beautiful place? After a lifetime battle of pain, Jenny’s suffering ended and peace sang. Peace of the warm aria of sunshine, the chorus of floating green leafs in the breeze, and the song of the flowers left by old friends.
I clutched the little book in my hand as the slew of memories assaulted me from a past I seldom thought about. Scattered to the wind now, everyone now leads lives separate from the immature chaos that was our youth. But the power of this photo pulled me back to the town I grew up in, to say the things I couldn’t then.
I walked down the symmetrically spaced rows of engraved stones of memorials. A child in winter then, I stood next to the sculpted angel now in summer. I slid the photo from its protective sleeve and laid it at the feet of the divine sculpture.
“It’s been a while.”
