a girl i knew when i was younger, i think maybe we had advanced reading in third grade together or something, we're facebook friends now, and today she posted an article she'd written.  it's funny how you can start off in the same classroom as someone, reading a cricket in times square, but fifteen years from then you can be in entirely different places with very different stories and skills.  the whole article is here, and all of it is stunning, but the paragraph below is the section where i saw bits of myself reflected.

There’s something in our eyes, though, that’s a little harder to place. Maybe it’s the Pavlovian training that young girls of a certain make and model receive as soon as they’re pushed in the grocery store buggy, clad in pink: we’re here to please, pale and all-American as the Coppertone kid. Smile, close-lipped, and widen those eyes until they’re blank enough to be adoring or penitent or charmingly unsure. We can read a face and mirror back the very thing it wants, flirtation or adoration or shyness or deference. We could be anything, as long as it wasn’t ourselves.