the me I was before you

There's a picture of my mother at seventeen in an old photo album. She has long blond hair parted in the middle and sad, khol lined eyes. When I was young, I used to stare it for hours. I knew that the woman in the picture was my mother, but at the same time she was so different, so utterly foreign from the woman I knew. It was hard for me as a child to understand that my mother had had a life before, had been a person before I existed. Who was this blond haired beauty with sad gray eyes? What did she want from life? Who had taken the picture?

I wonder now what picture Leila will stumble across of me and look at with shock bewilderment, wondering who was this woman before she loved me?

In Revelstoke at 19.