School Time Images

I was shy at school and during recess stood alone, standing up against a chain link fence, while I watched the schoolyard buzzing with its games of tag or jumping rope or shouting, chanting, laughing, crying, talking. Inside I knew I didn’t have to be that way.

One day, weeks after classroom pictures had been taken, we received a captivating envelope. Inside, besides our five-by-sevens, eight-by-tens, and wallet sized individuals, there shone a wondrous sheet with all the separate photos of my classmates smiling through.

My mother cut the universal glossy into personal existent images and I played with them while sitting on the floor, pretending we were in that busy schoolyard and I was nothing but the center of attention, playing childhood games and being infinitely happy.

Although, there were those times just two of us, me and Joanne Kerry, secreted ourselves away and climbed the coffee table, hand-in-hand, or rather edge-to-edge, and rested by a plastic apple in an emerald crystal bowl, whispering chromatics of our love for love.

In that moment, I would disappear, both physically and descriptively. What remained is now transmitting clouded memories some fifty-four years later—as if I never aged. In truth I see that consciousness was never born, and life is just this lesson trying to be learned.