Photography is thievery, the taking of pictures

I don’t like saying this: she was sometimes the kind of person who thought that looking good together was enough, like if only I were more photogenic. And I always thought of myself as the kind of person with a body that had to be looked past, not at. It was a point of tension is what I’m getting at. Prepositions and the way I put my sentences together in general were another, like what was I but rough edges that ran all the way to the core of my being.

So I am going through this shoebox and seeing how in every one of these she has the same smile, and I am thinking to myself that it was you all along who didn’t photograph well, the way you tried so hard to fake it while I grimaced and accepted that I was uncomfortable about the idea of being a physical presence that could be trapped this way in two dimensions when really I ran on and on and on in my head and also looked a good deal better, generally speaking.

There were a handful of pictures of her with someone else at the bottom, buried underneath all our posed memories, some guy who could be a model if his teeth weren’t so yellow. She was making the same face as she’s ever made, wide smile, head leaned a little toward the other person in the frame, arm around at the waist. Like she was a cardboard cut-out of a famous person in a storefront at the mall. I could have made a flipbook, her never changing as the world, and I, and this other dude, changed around her. It’s the kind of thing that could probably mean something, but doesn’t.