A Picture of Contrasts

I love this picture. Always have.

Just a couple of youngin’s walking down the street, up to no good.

This picture used to be on my bulletin board. Now it is in one of my special picture albums that does not conform to chronological order, as the rest of them do.

This is a picture of my asbestos friend and I walking down the street in front of my house while we were in high school. My mom shot it out our front door. My asbestos friend and I were probably heading from the small village grocery store back to her house. (I think she still stops at that store at least once a day, every day. I don’t know what she did when she lived 2,000 miles away in Arizona.)

To me, this has always been a picture of contrasts.

First of all, there is snow, but also puddles.

I am wearing a scarf, but no winter coat.

We are not children, but not yet adults.

We look like we are deeply engaged in conversation, when we were probably talking about nothing.

That isn’t true.  We were probably talking about boys.

I love this picture.  I love the purple boots I am wearing in the picture.

I still own that cream-colored hoodie and that scarf (I knew the hoodie was that old, but not the scarf.).  That hoodie can be found in the lower left of a picture in my post from April of 2012 called You Give Hoodies A Bad Name (https://imnotstalkingyou.com/2012/04/01/you-give-hoodies-a-bad-name/)

I look like I am almost skipping, probably just happy that someone stopped by and I got to leave the house for five minutes. At that time in my life, my friends were in sports, band, modeling, had boyfriends, etc. Me, well, I had television. An active imagination. Lots of markers to draw with. Ya, that was about it. My existence was pretty dull at that point.

But I don’t even mind that my mom secretly captured all that. It makes me yearn for more innocent days (but not boring days. Or high school. Or being sad, lonely, depressed, unloved, suicidal.)…ok, scratch “innocent days”.

It makes me yearn for my friend’s kid-free day, when we go roaming about as we please, willy-nilly, with no one to feed or take care of but ourselves.

Maybe what I see most in the picture is freedom. Freedom from school. Freedom from winter. From winter coats. From snow. Freedom to just be.