The Girl From the Past

I was forty when I was rifling through old files on my computer and I stumbled upon a set of photos from the brief and passionate relationship I had with the Russian shortly before I met my now husband.  The pictures were over a decade old. And what they captured was the girl I once was. A girl I had forgotten; perhaps wouldn’t recognize if I passed on the street. She is playing on the beach in a bikini- posing with reckless abandon. She is flirting with the camera or the man behind it. In one photo, the one that really stopped me in my tracks, she is staring straight at the camera, her hand grazing her lower abdomen. It is the very place the scar from her daughter's birth will one day live so many years in the future. She is confident and in love and unbothered by really anything in life.