As a girl with a mirror, I never saw myself as ugly, despite my stubbornly cow-licked hair. I was short-ish and thin, with dark hair and darker eyes that could see to China and back. Out with my mother as a child or with friends in high school, I could feel eyes on me despite my shyness and disdain for beauty products. I had only a handful of photographs from those days, but it was enough. I knew my mirror well then, not because I was vain, but because I needed to see who was behind those eyes — where she came from, what she thought, where she would go. She didn’t spill any of the answers, but I had a passable understanding of her from year to year.

Coming to know who you are is a very personal journey. I’ve never been comfortable on the lens end of a camera, and early photos illustrate that all too well. So while I pulled at non-compliant hair and did my best to fit in, I was invariably the awkward girl in any photograph. And a photograph, no matter how random, how good, how bad, how bland or how earth shattering, changes the way you see yourself, does it not? Even if I could have convinced my brain that I don’t really look like that, or at  least not all the time, it’s quite clear that this is the face I show to the world more often than not. But we are never just an awkward face.

My mom hated having her picture taken, and solved the issue by grimacing garishly and sticking her tongue out for every click of the button. It was a pretty effective way to erase the possibility that maybe this was her real face, her real soul, being shown. And why? She was beautiful.

It made me sad.

Thirty years later, I received an unexpected package from a very-long-ago boyfriend that held a cd filled with images he had captured in college. Back in the 70’s when few of us had cameras and even fewer had good ones, he was rarely without his Ricoh. To this day, he remains the only person, outside of my children, who could capture an image that showed my soul, simply because somewhere among those 1,095 days we spent together, I finally relaxed in front of the ever-present lens and let it see me.

And in a flash I was given the ability to see the girl I was, the girl I am, rather than the girl I’d been carrying around for decades. It made me happy.

Imagination / Perception / Memory: They live on in us regardless of how closely they match the actuality, don’t they?