Second Snapshot (Picture This Sequel: Niall Horan)

-Discover your weakness. [Chapter 55]

But I suppose you can’t always have you want, even if it felt like you should be able to. Things don’t always go your way, in another way, I was probably born into the wrong family. However wrong that sounded, I’d always felt like I didn’t fit. I’d always wanted different things to them. Garden parties and champagne fountains on summer nights? I’d much prefer the sand between my toes, the salt in the air as I licked an ice-cream watching the waves crash into each other. A white Porsche as the family car? I preferred Luke’s beat up Landrover that used to be his Dad’s. But it was figures; it wasn’t what I wanted or what I wanted my family to be. They wanted to give this all to me anyway, and if they didn’t give it to me they were pretty damn keen on making me sit there and witness it all, to at least live behind some double glazed windows and watch them enjoy this stuff, this high life.

I took another box of school reports from all those years ago and placed it on the bed that was already occupying around seven other boxes of my school work. The books I read, the essays I wrote and the pictures I drew. They were all so clearly mine, my name in my neat block print at the bottom followed by whatever class I was in at the time of completion. But they never felt like mine, like all that was a million miles ago, a million years ago either. It was so blatant that these belonged to me, they were my works; but they never felt like it. I sifted through the eighth box, an essay on why leap years occurred, a drawing of a frog on a Lilli pad, a battered and tatty book of the story of Hamlet. These were all so normal, and two-thirds of them I would probably throw away. But nothing could prepare me for what was lying at the bottom of this box.

It was a whole. It wasn’t ripped. It wasn’t dented. It wasn’t punctured. It wasn’t scribbled on. It was a whole. For a moment I just stared at it, feeling my breath catch in my throat I closed my eyes for a few seconds. I opened them again half expecting it to be gone, half expecting it to have just been a spur of my vision – but it was still there – and it was staring me right in the face.

My second birthday. My blonde curls were up high and tight in a ballerina bun, clad with Hello Kitty hair slides and a simple pink hairband holding them in place. My mouth was covered with ice cream and a bowl was led astray on the floor in front of me this sticky sweet liquid dribbling down onto my Mum’s expensive china. I was smiling a toothy grin – aside from my left front tooth I had taken a chip out of – walking into glass doors had been my forte. But it wasn’t the smile on my face, the pile of books in the background, or the ice cream stain on my teal t-shirt and white cardigan, it was her that really made the photo. My Auntie had always been a beautiful women, I was supposed to look like her more than my own Mother, which maybe I didn’t mind. My Mother’s eyes were grey and stormy; my Auntie’s the bright blue like mine. She always wore these long ankle length skirts and wooden jewellery, her hair blonde and long it was normally frizzy and reached her bum.

She had always had a petite frame too and the smallest hands people had ever seen for a women of her age – but she never looked out of place- everything about her style suited her. She would wear these brightly coloured bandanas and chipping teal nail polish. Her style could maybe be described as hippy like; but it suited her so well nobody batted an eye-lash when she was with us and our designer clothes. She was leaning over me and I remembered how dainty her hands felt that day as she squeezed my shoulders causing me to lift them up so they were touching my ears in that childlike fashion. She was smiling at the camera the corners of her eyes wrinkled as she did so, her teeth were slightly out of line but there was something so naturally imperfect about her it made her perfect. My Mum had pushed her to get braces; you can get invisible ones for two thousand now, you won’t even see em’, go on, we’ll pay for them for you. But she didn’t want it; she was one of those people who believed you were supposed to look like how you were naturally and that wasn’t supposed to be changed. If her hair went grey, it went grey, that was her sign of getting older and she wasn’t going to cover that up, she wasn’t going to conceal that she was getting on. Because to her, ageing was a beautiful thing. I’d always looked up to her as a child, wanting to be like her, look like her, dress like her. But my Mother had told me no, that was her way of life and not mine, I was perfectly fine in the clothes I wore, the way I wore my hair (neat and with no bumps) and the way I spoke (proper grammar is always a winner) and there was no way I needed to be like Jane. But somehow I wanted to be, or at least as a child I did. After she died I grew up and found my own personality and that wasn’t the same as Jane’s, but that was okay too.