Class Photograph.

I got the class photograph today. I look like a fool, as uual. Nothing new to report. But I look myself in that picture. Laughing along with Nid at some joke she cracked. The joke has passed on into infinity, but its mark remains- a memory of it stamped across our faces for the length of a human existence. Not, perhaps, as long as it would have liked, but it's something. and there we were, all together, grins on almost every cheek, giving of our best for memory's sake. So we look back and smile at our own smiles. And at our tears.
We were all feeling good standing there, the sun not quite on our faces, but making its presence felt nevertheless, after having heaped our blazers on to Ma'am Puxty's car that was parked nearby. Laughing. Clambering on to the benches, each one standing and shoving and making a little space for themselves in the universal space of the camera lens. I must be a part of that. And, naturally, noone is left out.
It would not have been the same, if we had taken photos of one person at a time ( besides being vastly impractical) and it would have been lonely there, in front of that lens with noone at my side, no familiar voice telling me to move up in decidedly indelicate terms.I would have felt small in that huge frame all by myself. Because when we stand there, we're not just people standing side by side. Not just people who share the same classroom or the same classteachers or similar schedules of living. We're comrades and allies as we pass through a particular phase of life all together, competing and discovering and understanding and laughing and being together. We see each other every day, each affecting the lives of the others in some quiet, unacknowledged way, each changing the lives of these about her in a way that is uniquely her own. We are Us. Being Us is a great deal better than being just Me or just You. I may not know much about the person next to me in that picture, but I will always know that she is in some minute capacity, a part of who I am and who I will be. And she most definitely is a part of Us.