In the intervening years, as I scrolled or clicked through these photographs, I often wondered which of us could be said to be more perverse: my schoolmates, every last one of whom, it appeared, had turned away from the world, retired to their enclaves, chosen the lives of their parents; or I, who had been plagued since childhood with the feeling that I needed to scrub myself clean, that all that was needed to be free was to physically remove myself from the company of people who comprised the community in which I had grown up, as though life were easy, or even possible.
