Two Decades, Caught By Surprise in Two Photographs
I found these two photographs by accident this week, looking for something else entirely. What struck me wasn't the photographs themselves — it was the realization of how long I've actually known the woman in them.
Twenty years. Not a number I was tracking, not an anniversary I'd marked anywhere. Just a quiet fact that had been accumulating the whole time, far longer than the two photographs that happened to remind me of it.
Laura, then and now — one example of the decades it's a privilege to witness.
The Math I Never Do On Purpose
This isn't really about the photographs, though I understand why a photograph is often what triggers it for people. A photo surfaces from a folder you forgot existed, and the gap between then and now becomes physical in a way the calendar never made it feel. But the feeling itself is bigger than any one image — it's what happens when you realize how long you've actually been paying attention to someone.
What stayed with me wasn't the hair, though I notice hair for a living and always will. It was simpler than that. It was the plain fact of having known someone — really known them, watched something in their life unfold in increments too small to name — for the better part of two decades. And then realizing how many people I could say that about. Clients going back into the 1990s. People whose kids I've watched grow up secondhand, through stories told in passing. People who've sat in front of me through job changes, divorces, new cities, new chapters they didn't always announce but that showed up anyway, in the way someone holds their shoulders or how quickly they laugh.
I don't think I appreciated, for a long time, what a privilege that actually is. Not the work — the witnessing. Most relationships that last that long come with a defined role: family, old friend, or spouse. Mine came with neither, and somehow lasted anyway. That's not something I set out to build. It's something that accumulated, year by year, without me doing the math.
Read: About Albert Narcisse.
What Two Photographs Don't Tell You About Twenty Years
Laura is one example. She isn't the only one — not by a long distance, not even close to the longest I've known someone in this capacity— but she's the one I happen to have pictures of like this, two moments far enough apart that the gap is undeniable on sight rather than something I have to explain. The photo on the left is from 2014. The one on the right is recent. Twelve years between them, by the camera's count. But Laura has been a client since 2005 — meaning the photos only capture the back half of something that's now run more than twenty years. Same warmth in the smile, in both. Same person, unmistakably — and also, unmistakably, someone who has lived two decades of life since I first knew her, only part of which the pictures happen to show.
I don't know what the next decade will hold for the people I've come to know this way. I don't think any of us do, about anyone. But I know I'll keep noticing it backward, the way I noticed it this week — not by counting forward, but by stumbling on the evidence and being quietly stunned by it.
Read: Good Hair Is a Relationship, Not a Makeover
I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it. I think that might be the point.
Effortless Color For The Real You.