I have a ghostly photograph of two girls
Taken at the Oregon coast in 1991.
I’m sure it was color film
But the image appears nearly black and white.

They are silhouetted against the cloudy gray sky and
The darker gray water.

Both girls are sixteen,
They are looking at each other,
Sitting closely together smiling, talking.

There wasn’t much light when the picture was taken
So their features are nearly obscured.

One reaches up to the other,
Perhaps to examine her earring more closely
Or to remove something that had caught in her hair.

Their mothers were friends in the seventh grade, and
Their mothers were friends at forty-three
When these girls were sixteen.

At seventy-six the mothers are still friends.
They might have dreamt back then
That the girls could be life-long friends,
Even though they lived two thousand miles apart.

But the girls’ lives were far different from their mothers’.
Lily died at twenty-five, Sarah at forty-two.
Both of cancer.

Sometimes when I look at that photo
I see my own sixteen-year-old face and my friend’s,
Looking at each other in the fading light,
Smiling and talking as girls.
The resemblance is strong.