There is a woman I knew in Chicago who I met through school- either the regular school year or, as I suspect, over the summer at our campus in Michigan. I think that I remember she was a grad student and I think I remember she had blonde hair, but I could be mistaking her for another woman I knew then. As it's often been my habit to know more people less well than a few people very well, many friendships I've made have been lost to time, lost in my memory. In fact, were it not for Facebook, Instagram, there are many more people I would have never known I'd known. Even though at the time I thought I knew them well. We would laugh, divulge secrets, cultivate jokes, go to class, get drunk, cry, pay for each others meals, bikes to each others houses at all hours, make art together.
This woman came to my house several times in my last year of college, and she took my portrait. I remember this. I think it was a large format camera, because it was a vey big to-do to get this photo taken. I would have been at the time more beautiful than I am now, although I would have despised myself anyways, not knowing that the looks I had would degrade even more as the years went on. I honestly thought I could only get better, but I know now there is no rock bottom. You can always get fatter, duller, worse. But I was 21, and I was strange and brown and some kind of pretty. I would wear flowers in my hair and long, perfect symmetrical wings of black eyeliner which made my big eyes bigger. And this woman took my portrait on my deck, on the third floor of my house in Chicago, on Kedzie Blvd where my rent was $425 a month for a room slightly bigger than the one I'm paying a mere $800 New York Dollars for now. My room then was green, my hair was black, the deck was wood, the woman was earnest and sure she would print the photo soon, it was just so hard to organize everything. I saw her a couple more times; she hadn't made the print yet, and soon I forgot entirely who she was. I don't know how to look her up, we didn't have yearbooks and the college's internal computer system experienced a full rehab 2 years after I graduated. My password doesn't work, my email doesn't exist. I have no way to look at the classes I took, the teachers I had, proof that I got an education. I'm locked out.
I hope somewhere out there there is a picture of me, youthful, hopeful, happy. I hope it's better than I remember. I hope I'll walk into a gallery one day and see my face smiling at me. And I hope I'll be in a good place, that I'll be smiling back.
