I have one framed photo in my bedroom. The photo is an image of me standing in the aisle of a gas station market. I’m wearing a dark green jump suit and carrying a black tote bag. In my hand I have my car keys and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. My body is facing away from the camera as I walk in the opposite direction, but my head is turned back and I’m looking into the lens. My face is partially obscured by my hand, which is flipping the bird. The lighting is a sickly green thanks to the fluorescent bulbs overhead, and the bottom right corner is blocked by the photographer’s finger, who accidentally obscured part of the lens when he snapped the photo. The photographer is my ex-boyfriend. We broke up last September.
I will be the first to acknowledge that
for one thing, having a framed photo of yourself is weird, and for another,
having a framed photo of yourself taken by your ex is extremely weird. My basic
reasoning behind having the image in plain view is that it is from a time in my
life where I was effervescently happy and obscenely in love, and when I see the
image, I remember what that felt like. By this logic, its value is primarily
nostalgic. When I see this image, I see my happiest self living during a gloriously
happy part of my life. Seeing it from his perspective through the image in
tandem with my memory of the image being taken, I remember how ridiculously
into each other we were. It’s entrenched in the past and in the memories
(however altered they may be) of retroactively perceived good times.
Still it would be easy to tuck away this
photo with the thousands of others from that point in my life. I have so many
photos of him from when we were together, and several of myself taken by him.
So why this one? Why bring this image into the trenches of my everyday, where
I’ll at the very least glance at it on a regular basis?
My best theory is that the photo now
serves as something aspirational. I want to feel this feeling and feel this way
about someone again. I want to get to a place where things felt like the just
fit with someone else again. It’s basic inductive reasoning: it happened in the
past, therefore it could happen again. This photo reminds me that there are
possible similar experiences in the future. I’m chasing the emotional dragon,
essentially.
After we split, I threw myself into my
work and studies and stopped dating. And, well, things could get lonely. Seeing
that image upon arriving home to sleep alone on a night I had no interest in
sleeping alone reminded me that, at the very least, I’m not wholly undesirable.
Thus the image works as an antidote to the occasional despair of the present. Since
nothing but the edge of my ex’s finger is in the frame, it’s easy to minimize
him from the context of the image in my twisted line of reasoning. It’s an
admittedly logic-free way to calm my fears about my inadequacies in terms of partaking
in a monogamous, romantic relationship (read: the modern romance myth) that will
supposedly fulfill my needs. Given how I am trying to un-learn the structure of
monogamy and romantic love that I’ve been told will complete me, it strikes me
as strange that I keep the photo on display -- even for nostalgic value. So it
goes.
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