The badge photo

The studio is changing its badges. New system, new cards, new photos, all of it decided somewhere above my floor for reasons that were explained in an email I read twice and still couldn't summarize. On Thursday we lined up by the front desk to be photographed against a gray sheet, handed in our old badges, and got new ones.

I asked if I could keep mine. The woman at the front desk, who has been there longer than the carpet, looked at me over her glasses for a while, punched a hole through the chip with something that looked like a pastry tool, and handed it back. "Don't let it go to your head," she said. I still don't know what she meant.

So now it's on my desk at home, and I keep picking it up. The photo was taken nine years ago this spring, and the woman in it is a stranger I'm fond of. She's wearing a blazer borrowed from Kristin, a size too big in the shoulders. She cut her own bangs the night before, which you can tell. She's trying to smile like someone who belongs in a building with a cafeteria that size, and she isn't managing it, and she knows.

Here's what she knew that spring. She'd written for small studios and for tabletop games, and been paid late for most of it. She'd never had health insurance from a job. She took the bus over the bridge that first morning with her hands shaking so badly she couldn't get the lid off her coffee, and she planned to last a year, learn what she could, and go home.

Here's what she didn't know. That she'd be good at it. That she'd stay. That she'd make some of the closest friends of her life arguing with them in hallways. That strangers would one day write to her, by hand, about things she'd made, and that she'd answer every one.

The new photo is fine. I look like my mother, which happened while I wasn't paying attention. I look like someone who knows where the good conference rooms are. I'm not sure I'd hire her over the woman in the blazer.

If you could say one thing to the person in your oldest ID photo, what would it be?