First:
Some photographs were not very successful. I photographed T and J in their dorm rooms and none of the photographs are very good compositionally and their exposures are ridiculously thin. I made out with J my sophomore year of high school for two nights while at my parents' house in Maryland. The year before J had asked me out and I said no.
I had been in some sort of love with T at the beginning of college. The misplaced variety of love, I think. I am slightly embarrassed by the depth of my feeling now, but that's how it was. It was a waiting kind of love. I knew a secret and the secret was we'd be great together. But if it took two to make the secret true, well, then it was never really a secret as much as wish. I believe that these two boys were the first four rolls I shot for the project. There is one photograph on J's contact sheets that has a silhouette of me in the background while J is in the foreground. It's an awful photograph. Compositionally, technically and conceptually it stinks. I don't really remember what J and I spoke about while I took his picture. I just remember that I should have had him sit away from the window for better light on his face. I also don't remember what T and I spoke of, though I know it felt awkward. I would have a hard time including these photographs in a collection. Though both boys played relatively significant roles in my life (without knowing it, of course) the photographs are amateurish and vague in focus and intent.
And the other:
I look overly pleased with the paper and situation around me. T, sitting cross-legged next to me, looks more miffed or bemused. I should say that my overly-pleased look can be easily notched up to, and understood as, sarcastic enthusiasm. But I don't think my smile is sarcastic, as easy as it would be to say it was. No, if the smile is overly large or verging on falsehood it's on account of the fact that I don't want T to think it's a big deal; that it means anything. We had spent a few hours in my pink walled room writing, longhand I guess, some kind of story together. Except it wasn't a story. It wasn't anything except two kids captured in their exact pre-occupations of the time. T's words are definitely prettier but mine are more honest. My printer was running out of ink, or perhaps it was when its laser printing brushes got fucked up forever, whatever the reason the sheets of paper we are holding with both hands in front of our bodies have a slight grey stripe down the middle.
Central to the photograph is the writing we hold in our hands. And yet I remember very little of the writing session. We were talking about change and loss and the people we had just spent the last four years getting to know and care about. We were writing about being outside of that space, knowing the future was going to be big and final. That what we held closest was going to seem small in short order. Maybe that's not what we were thinking. I remember deciding to include a poem I had written about a different moment spent with T. It verged on romantic but wasn't, at that time, exactly intended to be. But I put it in and T never said or wrote word about it. Either it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was or he simply had such a different outlook on the world that he didn't recognize my descriptions as something that applied to him. Who knows? Only him. Could I ask him? In theory, yes. But, really, I probably wouldn't go into that level of detail. I'll email him to make sure we were drinking and to what level and hope a little hope that he'll a) respond and b) give me pertinent details/remember what I'm talking about (which I did, he thought we hadn't been drinking…but in the 'manuscript' there is mention of booze). But it's equally feasible that he will simply not respond. I read his blog and he, on occasion, reads and comments on mine but we haven't been actively involved in each other's lives for years. And that, right there, is what is so strange about having a photograph of him displayed in my house. It's not that for a short amount of time I felt I was in love with him and that I thought we'd make a good couple, no: it's the fact that I still remember the moments that we shared outside of that emotional grip. No, that's not it. Well, it's partially it. There are people I let go of and not mind. Because what I thought we shared was rather surface level. But T made me laugh but also had relevant responses to my occasional seriousness and I'm pretty sure that, at the very least, I amused him. Youth just isn't that fleeting.
The photograph itself is in a hinged, two-sided, frame. The frame contains five photographs, three from high school and two from my freshmen year of college. It was a frame given to all graduates of the class of 1999 on the night of our dinner dance (aka prom). In theory I think we were to put photographs of ourselves with our dates and friends from that night. I do, in fact, have one such prom-friend photograph on display (which I will address soon enough). But somehow my date and I missed the formal posing platform and, frankly, if I think it's weird to have a photograph of T in my house it would be even weirder to have a photograph of my date and me (we weren't dating nor were we even friends, really).
It makes sense. Once in college, T ran away (distanced himself perhaps is a better phrase) from many people he had known in high school (or perhaps 'distanced himself from who he thought he was in high school' might be more accurate). I was immune because he didn't see me as a girl-girl or some remnant of a bad self-perception. But, eventually, he felt that-like so many others-I was no longer a relevant or positive part of his life. Is that what happened? Or did I get a boyfriend and start to think better than to see or talk to T? Either could be true. It's what the phrase "drifted apart" was made for…when both people (friends or lovers) can equally be seen as the active member of that drift.
It's embarrassing that I remember so much about T. I own how I felt. I do. But seeing that our friendship hasn't lasted, how can I not regret remembering so many stories or small occasions we shared? I haven't actively been his friend since, maybe, 2002? Five years. And yet I still feel like if he was open to it, we could still have a nice chat. I wouldn't have any desire to express my no-longer-existent feelings of love and he could admit that I've never been all that important in his emotional life. We could also catch up. He could tell me about how he's still friends with his ex-girlfriend and I could tell him that I was too! And maybe, if I were really brave, I would tell him that that was a lie. That E and I aren't friends. That I pretend like I'm capable of being his friend in the hopes that he just needs time before realizing he's made a really bad mistake. Basically, due to the fact that we have a shared bit of history, I would feel comfortable having a relatively honest conversation with T about my life and his own. I believe we had those kinds of talks earlier in our lives. But I know that, somehow, I'm missing something. Maybe we never had those kinds of talks? The fact that I still find him a valuable part of my past somehow makes me wonder if words like pathetic or delusional apply to me a bit more than I'd like.
Sigh.
I have a whole other framed photograph that T is a participant in. Who else is in it? J.R. (a crush of mine at the time), E.H. (no longer in contact with her but I hear she has a flower shop), M.M. (no idea what happened to him but he took me to his junior prom), K.C. (we went to the same college but weren't buddies, last I heard he had married a Chinese woman in China), S.P. (I don't keep in contact with him but whenever I see him it's comfortable and familiar), T and me. The photograph was taken by T's mother at my insistence on the weekend of the Tibetan Freedom Concert in D.C.. I am standing in the front of the group, one hand across my belly and the other in the air. I have a similarly unattractive but smiling crazy look on my face. I am beginning to recognize this face as "the face I make when I think something is a lot of fun and worth remembering but that the others around me don't feel as enthusiastic about and definitely don't want to take a photograph over".
It's a strange thing to be connected by a thread. Or even several threads. These days a thread equals having someone's physical address-or being their 'friend' on MySpace- a double thread is having someone's email, the beginning of a rope is a blog and an actual rope is a phone number. I guess. Maybe the blog is more of a thread and a physical address is more of a rope? Most of the people I want to contact, I have enough information to find them. I think that the communication time for T and C is over. I have to admit that we're not friends now nor will we be in twenty years and write about our friendship as it is: over, pleasantly enough, but done nonetheless. So looking at these photographs I have to acknowledge that I'm looking at something dead. Something that nothing I could do or say would change…only make more, and unnecessarily, awkward. The number of words I have for this whole thing makes me feel like I'm still "in love" with the guy. Or makes me see how others could think it. But I have just as many words for others who I never fancied. And what's so bad about being acquaintances with someone you used to be friends with?
And what about those I remember who do not have corresponding frames? Those I have to search out in my many shelved and undusted photo albums? Photographs I remember without having them on display. So many people.
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