Four photographs ยท one evening
There are four photos of you. I meant to look once. A while later I was still there, and by then I had started writing down what I thought you were like. A lot of this is probably wrong. I was not trying to be right about you. I just wanted to see how much of you was actually in there.
You do not look at the camera. Not once, in any of them. Eyes down, eyes shut, turned away. You will stand there for the photo but you are not going to perform for it.
In the one in the sun you closed your eyes completely instead of squinting. You gave up on seeing anything at all rather than pull a face about it.
And then you saluted. Nobody asked you to do that. Somebody said stand there, and you decided standing there was boring.
You were on the grass. There was a path. You were not on it.
In the mirror one you are smiling at the floor, and that smile is not for the camera. It is for whoever was in the room saying something. I like that the best thing in that photo is pointed at a person and not at us.
You kept the photo where you look completely fed up. Most people quietly delete that one. You left it up where anybody can see it.
You let one of your four be the back of your head. Somebody who wanted to be looked at would not spend a whole slot on that.
Your phone is in your lap on a long empty road and you are not touching it. You can sit in nothing happening, which is rarer than you would think.
In three of the four, your hand has gone up to your head. In your hair, flat on your forehead, hanging on to something. You are a person whose hands do not stay put.
Your hair is different in every one of them and not once has it been made to behave. I think you settled that argument a long time ago.
You were wearing almost exactly the same pink as the flowers behind you. There is no chance you planned that. It is still the best of the four.
In all four there is somebody just out of frame holding the camera. Four different days, four people who were glad to stop and do that for you. That tells me more about you than any of the photos do.
You do not have a photo face. The same person turns up in all four, in a rickshaw, in a mirror, in the dark. Most people have at least one face they keep for this.
And in every single one of them you look like you were in the middle of something else. Which is, as far as I can tell, the only way anybody ever ends up looking like themselves.
Fourteen things, and not one of them was put there for anybody to find.
Most of this is me reading far too much into four photographs. It was a good way to lose an evening.