Article by Marynn Krull Art by Liz White
I couldn’t bring myself to plunge a tack through him, so his photograph is tucked against the wall, peeking out at me from around the top left corner of the corkboard.
It hasn’t moved in six years.
When I catch his eyes fixed on me while I’m changing in my childhood bedroom, my heart surges with the startling rush of an overdue crush. The hairs on the back of my neck stand in an invisible breeze as I pull my shirt up and over my head. When I feel his presence, I’m a cat basking in a fortuitous beam of sunlight breaking through the curtains, savoring this beautiful, unexpected moment for however long it lasts. It’s those six seconds between the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder when you hold your breath and begin to count.
Perhaps, more aptly, I’m a prisoner caught in the flashlight of the panopticon, happy to entertain while he’s paying attention.
I’m always tempted to let out a laugh, like I’m getting dressed next to a familiar lover. Only we never experienced cold hands on bare skin and prolonged barefoot kisses. It’s the incompleteness that makes my stomach roll a bit in discomfort. Long-expired coyness seizes me, and I quickly pull on a too-small t-shirt, enveloped in the smell of stale drawer. I offer one last self-aware glance back at the photograph and think to myself, to him, it’s okay; I don’t mind. These moments feel like offering him a glimpse into the grown-up, comfortable relationship we never had.
At the funeral service, I remember gazing numbly at the table of his things: loose cups of instant ramen, a Costco tub of big crunchy pretzels with the large grainy salt, a PlayStation controller, and a scattering of turtle plushies from family trips to Texas. The treasured objects of a fifteen-year-old boy. How terrible that a loved one should have to immortalize a person in their most treasured things. That’s why I can’t remember what photo they chose to capture his memory in the program.
It’s fitting that our immortal moment should be one of early-teenage desire, like a lip-puckering sip of cheap wine. Our time together was self-conscious and giddy, tinged with a sarcastic self-deprecation that ages embarrassment into nostalgia.
Wondering who he would have become lingers in the exhale after every adult milestone. I stifle the twinge of hurt that singes my lungs and suppress the cough like I pulled an overly ambitious drag of someone else’s cigarette. His memory filters each memory like dust particles suspended in the light, visible only to me: he should’ve experienced this.
Like squinting into an overexposed photograph, I strain to make out the contours of his face. I wish we could linger in a corner together now, with our respective partners mingling around a loud room. I would aimlessly swirl my mature choice of drink in its glass and throw my head back at one of his jokes, feeling older, a little sexy, and thrilled to have run into each other, but completely uninterested in anything more. Blinking slowly, a little tipsy, I’d burrow my eyes into his, searching for recognition nestled in long pauses and prolonged gulps. My chest would warm, and my words would slur together, talking about nothing and remembering everything. I’d think about it the whole way home, and for a few minutes before bed, staring up into the inky black ceiling. I might even bring it up to my boyfriend in the car, or while brushing our teeth, nonsensibly but innocently, just savoring the cosmic oddity of introducing one’s first love to their last one.
When I picture it, he’s as old as he should be, and more confident.
In the photograph, his face looks too young to my older eyes. His dark, stubbly beard dwarfs the age-appropriate, barely-there mustache he didn’t bother to shave. His hair is cropped short across his forehead, I think in the style his mom chose. He’s wearing the too-thick-for-October black hoodie that I only really noticed in the last few months of his life. I always thought it looked heavy, like a weighted blanket — like it held him together. You couldn’t see the way his chest quaked and quivered when he laughed with that big hoodie on. His expression is shy but smiling, on the precipice of a groan, frozen in the moment he saw someone he loved, simultaneously realizing they were photographing him.
That’s why it’s so uncanny to meet now, at twenty-one and forever-fifteen. When I feel him in my room, I’m fractured down the middle, split from crown to core. Fourteen-year-old me, size small and five feet tall, oozes out all over the new carpet. Twenty-one-year-old me is paralyzed, yearning to pull him to me and rustle that dorky haircut — not run my fingers through it. In the years that have passed since his passing, encountering him has fermented into something astringent — sour, dry on the tongue. Now, I’m a too-old babysitter of his memory, no longer a peer in young love. It’s a light-bodied grief that lingers on the lips.
Around wintertime, when everyone comes home to rendezvous uncomfortably in the candy aisle, I’ll half-heartedly listen to his old friends, aimless without the presumption of any glimpse into his life. Someday in the future, when I’m scrolling late at night, I won’t stumble upon his wedding photos and frantically text old friends. There won’t be baby photos from his mom, or cross-country moves that make me wonder, “Is he really a Florida kind of guy? What about the snow?” I would only feel pride that in some small way, we taught each other the first syllables of loving.
At least he’ll get to know those things about me, I tell myself when I feel his eyes pouring into me, at me, from the photograph.
I’m left standing all alone, half-dressed in my ballerina pink bedroom, wanting to call his mom with nothing to say.
As if his heart is still beating somewhere else, when I’m not confronted with the cold truth of the photograph, I ponder him, as all exes do. When I slide into the leather backseat of a messy minivan, I wonder if any first dates are happening at the Baskin-Robbins on his side of town. When I saw the beach for the first time and waded through the softly lapping water, I searched for turtles. A knot settles in my throat when I consider whether I’ll wear the turtle pin on my college graduation gown. A small part of me thinks I might pin it to my wedding dress, too.