Changed

Jack ran his fingers across a stack of photo albums and randomly picked one out.
As he browsed through each photo, he smiled to himself as images of those photos brought back an alarming amount of memories he thought he had long forgotten.
It seemed so long ago.

"Gosh... She looks the same", he thought to himself.

Then he came upon one particular photo that caught his eyes.
His finger, the one that was guiding the pages of the album paused momentarily.
Slowly and steadily his finger slid down towards that picture.
Jack carefully pulled that picture out of its resting place and stared hard at it.
At first, his thoughts were empty. His mind wandered in pitch black darkness.
He looked at that picture with great intense and gradually, a million words came in to fill the blanks.
But one word stood out the most.
Change.

"Change... You've changed my friend...", he whispered as if the person in the photo was alive.
His eyes began to watered.

No matter how people try to console and convince themselves that they are the same person from yesterday, the fact still remains that they aren't.
People change.
People may look the same - same features, same smile, same distinct nose and same eyes - yet, something within them creates a whole new being over time.
Time produces change.
Change is inferior to time.
Ultimately, humans are inferior to change.

Change can be a good thing or a bad thing.
The scary thing is of course, if it turns out to be the latter.
But the scariest thing about that is this;
Contrary to what most believe, when you know a person too well, the changes are actually harder to detect and that is what makes it so frightening.
When we know a person too well, we become comfortable with who they are and in the midst of such complacency, we somehow brush aside the little changes they choose to undertake.
People begin to mitigate the power of change and before they know it, it blows right in front of their face.
A hairline crack becomes a full broken bone.

It's a sad thing really, Jack thought to himself in an almost sympathetic way.
The tears in his eyes were still forming but not enough for them to find its way down his cheeks.

"You've changed", he said it again.

He took a deep gasp of air and pulled himself together.
As he held the photo in his right hand, he took a final glance at it in his somewhat nostalgic and yet pensive mood.
Before he slid the photo back into its rightful frame, intuitively or not, something triggered him to flip the photo around.
And there he saw how old the person was.
At the back of the photo, on the bottom right corner, scribbly handwritten faded black-inked words read,

Jack,
20 years old.