Disposable Camera Freshman Year

                Disposable cameras seem a thing of the past; most of the selfies I’ve taken over the past ten years have been with the camera of an iPhone.  Pictures from disposable cameras often come out weird: blurred, too much or too little focused; with red-eyed friends, with the point of attention being just a bit too far in the left-hand corner.  The picture I have that I have to write about has two subjects in the center.  The corners are frayed, and there are probably more than a thousand colors portrayed in the portrait of two boys (along with an anonymous hand poking its way through the sphere of center of attention).  You can tell the camera had a flash, because the right side is darker than the left.  The picture is five inches by three and a half inches.

                The picture is of two boys that went to the same school as me; until the middle of sophomore year.  That was the point of my high school career when I transferred.  The boy on the right had his arm around the shoulder of the boy on the left.  The picture was taken during freshman year.  The boy on the left had curly blonde hair, and was wearing a green polo shirt with a black and white stripe across the front.  He was slouched in his chair so that it appeared like he was shorter than the boy on the right.  His right eye was slightly larger than the left, and his right eye was slightly red, in response to the flash of the camera.  The boy to the right had curly, brown, parted hair, and he also had a slight case of red-eye.  He wore a baggy yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt.  It was a very baggy shirt, baggier than his friend’s.  The atmosphere was a classroom.  On the right, there was a hand from some aforementioned stranger, poking its way through the borders of the sides of the photograph.  On the back of the picture are the words written by my friend from high school, Kelly; it reads in neat handwriting:  John Casey and Eddie Larame.  The words cover the backside of the photograph, over the print that is customary with the backside of many photographs, which read: “Kodak Paper.”  The photograph doesn’t have a scent, and it is inedible, and it lacks a sound that might be possible if the photograph I am writing about was an element of Harry Potter book, or movie.  Both sides are smooth to the touch. Even though the photograph is about twenty years old, it is still in pretty good shape.  I guess that is expected with a picture that remains in the back of a photograph filing cabinet for two decades. 

                There isn’t much story behind the picture, but that which there is, is interesting.  One day during my freshman year of high school, I brought a disposable camera, so that to take pictures of my fellow students and the happenings of that which occurred during a normal school day.  A girl that I used to be friends with, Angela, brought the camera with to her Religion class.  She took some pictures, including the one I am writing about. 

                I remember looking through the pictures when I first picked them from Walgreens.  There were a lot of people I didn’t know.  There were a lot of pictures of people I didn’t know and wanted to be friends with.  This picture was one of the more notorious of the results of the camera project, for me, partly because the two boys who were the subject were complete strangers, yet I felt like I had some association with them, at that point. 

                It’s always interesting to look at pictures of you and your fellow youth during your time together, because so much has changed; including you, them, and, most importantly, the circumstances of life.  I remember the peak of my days as a freshman in high school was lunch, or a class that was laidback so that it was easy to socialize.  A lot has changed.  Things have gotten more difficult for me, as an adult, but at the same time, I have so much more independence now.  This picture, of two boys that seem sure of themselves with their smiles, and the pacific look in their eyes, shows how much things can change, yet at the same time, remain the same. 

                This object, this photograph, troubles me because it reminds me of all that I had left behind when I transferred.  In the middle of sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with clinical depression.  I went to the hospital for a week and then I transferred to an all girl’s Catholic school, one where I had friends from grammar school.  It took a few years for things to start to get normal again for me, and I oftentimes wish to go back in time and do things over.  I wonder, a lot, if there was something I could have done at my first school so that I wouldn’t have had to transfer.  The first school I went to was also a private Catholic school, but it was co-ed, meaning that, before my transfer, I used to have the opportunity to socialize with girls, along with boys, during school hours.  This picture troubles me because, although the two males in it are relatively strangers, I think of how I could have been friends with them, had I tried just a little bit more.  I wonder, sometimes, if I had been a better person, would people have thought better of me, so that I would have had more friends?

                The one thing I wonder about is what these two males, portrayed, used to think of me.  Their expressions could be considered poker faces, they could be considered cold, they could be expressions expressing the possibility that maybe they wondered about me.  This picture is troubling because it reminds me of what I could have had with them, and others like them.