Y is for Yearbook
Sharon kept all of her yearbooks. She even had her elementary school ones. She remembered jokes her friends told her in the third grade as well as drunken adventures she had with her roommates in college.
Every now and then, she would fish them out for a trip down memory lane. Alistair loved seeing this side of her. She would tell her stories like they happened yesterday and all of them helped shape the woman he grew to love today. He did not have all of his yearbooks, but he had some. He fished out his senior one. It of course, had been signed by all of the girls. The boys signed it too, but just their names and maybe a clever joke or insult. The girls wrote him freaking essays and Sharon loved to tease him and call him the high school gigolo.
Most of Alistair's pictures were of his friends. In many of them, the boys were drunk off booze they pinched from their parents' liquor cabinets, but there was one picture that stood out amongst the rest. It was him, his father, his mother, and his little sister. He was 12 years old and his sister was 5. He said that right before they took that photo, his mother told him that he had to promise her that he would always look out for Lexi, that one day, she would be gone and their father would be gone and it would be just them. He, at the time agreed, but didn't understand how true those words would be. He didn't know in four short years, she would be gone.
He put that photo in his yearbook, so he would never forget that moment. They were sitting by the fire when he told her how that picture came to be. She never looked at him or any yearbook the same way again. Every time she saw one, she saw him, a twelve year old boy with the whole world in his grasp and she saw a 17 year old him, looking back and already realizing that time was gone.
It was one of those bittersweet moments that made her love him even more, even when she didn't think that was possible.