Two for Tuesday: Bittersweet

There's a fancy pants word literary types use called synecdoche which means, roughly speaking, summoning something in its entirety by drawing attention to a part. In this image, the twosome's woven legs are the part that shows the entirety of a friendship.

It's not every day you find a person you love so much you can cross your bare leg over theirs, making it look like the most natural move in the world.

I taught these two lovely and intelligent classmates during my art residency this year at Forest Park Elementary. I didn't get parental permissions to share their photos, so I cropped the image down to hide their faces and ended up liking how their body language revealed the trust and comfort these fourth grade girls felt with each other. 

When I asked them how long they'd been best friends, they'd said since kindergarten. 

Their intimate unity took on greater meaning when the girl wearing the dress told me she was moving the next day, leaving school in the middle of the year, about to say goodbye to her buddy who knew her secrets, knew her before she could spell.

She was moving, she wasn't sure where, didn't know why and couldn't remember the name of her new school. In an instant, the love I saw became bittersweet.