I spent the last four days at “Math Camp,” learning how to use our new math curriculum. I’m excited about the new curriculum, but spending the hottest days of the summer thus far in Augusta, in an (un-AC) dilapidated high school, doing math, sucked.

I do love the new program, and I love that I am actually learning math! Which is nice for the teacher to know math, you know. But, by learning it, I mean seeing what a square root is, not just ‘knowing’ it.

But, in addition to being in Disgusta for three nights, away from my fabulous husband, I made the decision to look through the yearbook collection at the high school we were in.

Now, see, this was Aton’s high school. I couldn’t help but think about him, not the WHOLE time, but repeatedly over the four days I was there. When I saw the yearbooks, I couldn’t not look. Just to see. Just to look.

And, I pulled it down, the 1992 Coniad (which sounds like a disease that could have been contracted in the nasty-ass bathrooms at the school) and flipped through. I didn’t see anything, right away, but there was an index. So I looked him up.

There he was, in a smirking formal pose in the seniors section. And again, blurry at the back of the track photo. The one that captured me though, that I couldn’t look away from, was a candid that took up two pages. It was highlighting the ‘fashionable choice’ of LLBean backpacks; several kids were at a table piled high with the signature pack. The kids in the foreground were hamming it up for the camera, and there he was, in the back, looking downwards but slightly toward the camera. Smiling enough for a dimple, but one side of his mouth stretched open farther, smirking, again. The little gap between his teeth was there. It was him.

Even now, sitting here on my couch, next to my husband that I adore, I am tearing up a bit. I’m trying NOT to, so i don’t have to explain to Dave how six years (this week) can fly by so quickly, and I am stopped short when I realize that he hasn’t written anything in six years. He hasn’t worked summers on the coast, he hasn’t showed up in the middle of the night, he hasn’t called out of the blue, just to say hi.

He’s been dead for six years. Longer than I knew him. And yet it can still strangle me in a public place to see a picture. It’s not that I would still be with him, but he was one of those figures that had so much to do with who I am now, with where I am now, that I can’t believe he is actually, truly, still dead.

And I think of how my writing has evolved, or how I write has evolved, and how my online journal is something that we would never have even been able to dream up, in our caffeine and nicotine fueled plans for world domination. If he was alive, he would have been all over this technology. And he would have been fucking fascinating, still.