before tiktok

I SEE YOU IN THE FAMILY PHOTO ON MY OFFICE WALL. Flanked on your right by three younger siblings, on your left by an older sibling and your parents. You were eleven.

Elementary school. Pre-braces. When your teeth were still crooked and gave you that little turtle smile that you wouldn’t mind until a few years later. 

Before you had an iPhone or discovered TikTok. Before you cared what was in style and Mom still picked out your clothes. Before anyone ever made you feel small or self-conscious. Before you worked up the guts to press your bottom lip against your teeth and vocalize your first f-word. 

Did I miss it? 

I was struggling then. A selfishness. I allowed a magical time in your life to pass me by at highway speeds. Blurry in the window. Could we compromise and chalk it up to the existential battle every man or woman experiences around 40? I hope so.

The photo is an ascending height of shared genetics and space. You jump out at me.

Purple leggings. Purple shirt. Turquoise hoodie. A blue and black purse strapped across your shoulder. Black knock-off Uggs.

What was in the purse? What items and secrets does an eleven-year-old girl carry under guard? Could I step into the photo and ask? Or had the seed of mystery, a woman’s virtue, already sprouted? A nervous smile and a shake of your head.

Or perhaps a nod and the contents emptied on a nearby bench.

I see a used and nearly broken digital camera taken from the junk drawer. It turns on and you show me a photo of a blurry flower with the peach smudge of your fingertip in the corner. A tube of watermelon-flavored lip gloss. No lid. Out comes a dried and dead marker also missing the lid. A tiny spiral with a janky pencil shoved into the bent and compressed rings. Gum wrappers. No gum. A blue hair brush with white puffy clouds painted on it. Two dollars.

I see you in the photo. Was I enough?

You can’t do that to yourself.

Why not?

Does time absolve or do mistakes fester?

Giggly laughs before hormones lowered the timbre of your voice and the world lowered your expectations.

The movies you liked during that time filled my ears as I busied myself doing more important grownup things. But how many times I sat next to you and shared the stories I can’t say. Your bike sat motionless on too many weekend afternoons. The makeup you wanted to paint on my face wouldn’t have been so bad.

For all the important grown-up things I was doing then, I don’t remember any of them. 

Yes. Mistakes fester.

But there’s a bit of redemption in another photo. It’s you in a fancy purple dress with your makeup done for the daddy-daughter dance. You’re riding a Ripstik and staring into the camera with that contagious turtle-smile. Dinner and dancing and potty-breaks and standing in line for punch and iced sugar cookies. A dark gym with loud music and flashing lights and little dancing girls playing with their friends in between occasional check-ins with their awkward fathers.

We went to a lot of those dances, you and I.

In these days of driving and arguments and curfews and eye-rolling and boys and more f-words than I could ever count, I still see you.

Amidst the unjustified angst. The justified sadness. The matter-of-course bumps in a shared road. 

I see you at eleven. Seventeen. It doesn’t matter.

Your shirt reads, “Go. Be. Love.”

Fax, bruh.