There is a box in my closet, right next to my baseball cards and under my small collection of Mariner Autograph Balls. It's a brown box, nothing too fancy. It would be amongst the last items a thief would take, though it's perhaps the most valuable thing in my room. Inside the box are hundreds of pictures that I have taken of camping trips, elementary, middle, and high school, college pictures, Mariner games, and many other treasured moments.

There is one picture in particular that means more to me than all other pictures. It is the only picture I have of just her and I... Who is her you ask? I wish I could tell you, the truth is that I don't even know myself. She is the person that I measure everyone to, she is the person that haunts all of my relationships, she is the one that got away...

From the first time I saw her, to the last time I saw her, our story spans 12 years. We grew up together, laughed at each other, and held each other through the tears. Not only were we friends, but we saw each other as more, though we never took those steps. The details aren't important, only know that I haven't cared for anyone as much as her, and few people have impacted my life as much as her.

But years from now, there will come a day, when I no longer breathe without thinking of her, when I take my last breath. And what happens then? Someone will go through my stuff and sort it out not by emotional value, but rather by monetary value. What good are pictures to someone who isn't in them? And all those moments of time, captured forever, will be the first to go. Someone might look through them, might want to try guess what the person who took these photographs was like. And they may come across that very picture of her and I on the couch smiling together, and think nothing of it, and go on and leave it in the past... something I have never been able to do...