identification

I've been looking through old photographs, and some of the pictures I'm in are starting to bother me. It's not just that I can't place where they are, but I can't place the emotions--sometimes even the place isn't quite enough. It only happens when they catch me off guard. I'm never quite looking at the camera, and there's that look in my eyes like I'm afraid of something, that nervous smile like I didn't really believe that it would be all right in the end.

I knew a girl who looked like that in photos, but only when she knew it was happening. Off the camera, she was excitable, but she looked unafraid--like everything really would be okay, despite her constant misgivings about it.

What bothers me most is that it only happens to me when I don't know there's a camera. When I know there's a camera there I look so calm and composed and smug, but when I don't I'm so uneasy, so tense, so nervous. Photographs have that weird power about them, to capture a moment forever, that one instant--and I worry that maybe she's the one that really had it together, and I'm the one who's afraid of everything.