1979

I looked through my parents' old photograph books. Pictures dated back to the early sixties, beginning in black and white, then gradually gaining color. Frozen moments of people living in a different time. My parents young and happy, their smiles tinted in sepia. But the people in the pictures don't exist anymore, really. The strangest feeling came over me. I kept turning the pages, but I began to cry. I wept and wept. I don't know why. My mother's long blonde hair, her genuine grins on every page. And my father, with hair, looking like any handsome young man you might meet today; lazing on a sofa or proudly mounted on his motorcycle or simply holding a beautiful young woman who would one day be my mother. I could see so much of myself in them and not because they are my parents, but just in the feelings, the emotions, the expressions they held. They were just the same as I am now. I had never given much thought to my parents existing before I did, but seeing them like this, living out their youth eternally through these photographs just made me feel so strange. I couldn't stop crying and I don't know why.