Myrna

I hadn't seen her since eighth grade graduation, but it would have been impossible for me not to recognize her. I was on Microsoft's site getting stock photos of office workers, then using GIMP to put them into photos of historical disasters...it was Thursday, that's what I do on Thursdays. Fucking Thursdays.

Anyway, it wasn't that she looked the same, because her face clearly showed every second of the twenty plus years that had passed. It was the expression on her face; I suppose she was aiming for "caught while glancing up from my laptop as I ponder some really important business decision" or something like that, but what I saw was "purposefully looking as though I don't know that you're looking at me", simply because that was the expression she had been wearing for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half STRAIGHT every time I looked at her in junior high.

I was never sure whether she managed to keep that look 24/7, or if she had some kind of freakish radar that allowed her to assume it just before my eyes moved her direction, hiding whatever she had been thinking behind the perpetual cool of put-on indifference.

I guess it doesn't really matter in the long run; we all create our own reality, and thus we have to live in it, no matter the cost. If you're too scared to let someone know you're vulnerable to them, you're safe...but safety can be very, very overrated.

I put her in the Whitman tower shooting; I guess the lighting matched the best on some of those photos, and I wasn't really up for a challenging night after the shock of having run across her again after all of those years. Her facial expression didn't really fit in, I guess, but it didn't matter very much in the finished product. I didn't have her taking a bullet or anything, after all, and there may have been people at that scene so lost in themselves that they still managed to maintain an assumed expression in the face of the chaos and the panic, who can say.

I put it up on my blog, and it got some of the most positive comments yet, actually. Maybe she'll run across it some day on the web, some random cross posting when she becomes famous as a model where some total noob posts it and asks, "WTF??? How old is thsi chick anywai???? lol" or something like that. Or maybe it will just take its place among all the other lost memories in the ether, random thoughts and moments from lives that don't even exist anymore (given enough time) in our new collective virtual eternity where we all get starring roles.

And, yes, I have done myself in a picture, but you'll just have to stumble across that one yourself.