FOUR PICTURES

A reflection on love and other ambiguities

The English language—as you might guess given its creation by the stereotypically reserved English people—is profoundly deficient in its ability to express certain emotions. Greek has half a dozen words for “love”—the warmth and closeness one feels for a son or daughter differs from that for a spouse and differs again when we are talking about a great aunt, or love of one’s country, or humanity in general, or even early 90s hip-hop or Wes Anderson movies. English clumsily groups all these ideas together and leaves it to the listener to sort out which type is meant. The most enigmatic kind of love—the kind even Greek has no word for—cannot really be expressed in words. But it turns out you can see it in pictures.

Two I found first, together, in a souvenir picture wallet. The kind that made good souvenirs when pictures had to be printed out and saved in picture albums that get shoved in boxes and buried in closets. This one wasn’t in a closet. It was a sturdy wooden box with a lid and a latch I had, probably since I was 6 or 7, in my parents’ basement. The box had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on all four sides and the top, to guard all my important possessions: A black leather bag with a Native American motif stitched in beads on the front that held my coin collection, a plastic horse from a long-forgotten garage sale, yearbooks and class photos and pennants. There were other pictures with them too, but they didn’t matter. The wallet, and the pictures in it, were from my high school senior night. The sort of crappy lock-in party they have after graduation to keep people from unintentionally killing themselves driving drunk and what not. It was dorky. But everyone went. So I went.

I did the giant boxing gloves thing with Brian Jones and I don’t really remember what else. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, or who with. I already had one foot out the door, and so did most everyone else, though few going the same direction as me. I enjoyed my time, especially the last two years, but I was done with these people, with this place. It never felt like my own. I was from there but not of there. But she wanted to be with me. She hung on my arm. Probably she didn’t have anyone else to be with, so she attached herself to me. It wasn’t exactly a full reversal of our usual pattern, but I rarely felt pursued. It was what I wanted, except that I didn’t. I wanted to be with her but not tied to this place. And it wasn’t clear she was open to leaving, or even thought of it as an option, even apart from me.

Anyway, I always kept my relationships (such as they were) secret or, if not fully secret, hermetically sealed off from the rest of my life, the way you keep raw chicken from cross contaminating your salad. There was the one girl from the weeklong program I went to junior year from up near Port Huron, my first real kiss. There was one from the program I went to in Washington DC my senior year who lived in New Jersey and I had four-hour phone calls with and went to visit over spring break. Later on, the girl I met at the study abroad program in Belgium, and the following year the Australian girl who conveniently came with her own built in geographic limitations. No one had to know any more about them than I cared to share. Or even that they existed at all. But here she was, hanging off me, exposing me. Acknowledging feelings publicly, even feelings of attraction, is vulnerability. Somebody knows who you like. And vulnerability is weakness. Somebody can pick it apart, find flaws, judge, critique, criticize. Weakness becomes pain.

She was the same way, at least a bit, with a boyfriend at the time from some other town and a job away from school. No activities other than swimming as far as I remember. Even school away from school for the last two years when she did law enforcement at the career center. It felt safer to keep things separate, like a Swanson TV dinner. I think for her too. There wasn’t anyone for her here. Someone whose name I no longer remember, seeing her on my arm, asked when he caught me alone for a moment, “is she your girlfriend?” I said “no.” I didn’t want to say no. I desperately wanted to say yes.

But we were also too young. I was scared. It wouldn’t last, and I doubted that when it ended—which it would—that I would be able to handle it. There was too much riding on it. Too much invested to roll the dice. If I rolled them now, I would lose. This wasn’t for a trial run. If it was for anything, it was for keeps. There was no fucking this one up. Rejection I could manage. I’d had plenty of that. Disintegration was something else entirely. If I lost her, I would lose myself.

We did the Photo Booth. I wasn’t sure why. She insisted. Earlier in the day at the graduation ceremony my dad had asked if I wanted a picture with her. I said no. I don’t know why exactly, but I think I was uncomfortable with the idea that it would mean something. Or that she would say no, or hesitate—anything to suggest that I wasn’t that important to her. That I was assuming a degree of connection that wasn’t mutual. It was a mistake. A big mistake. Probably, I was trying to get some separation as well, preparing myself for the inevitable when I went off to college in 10 weeks’ time. I was more excited than sad. But it’s hard to avoid a Photo Booth while getting pulled around by the … hand. I would have looked better if we had taken the picture a few hours earlier. Now I just looked flushed from hitting Brian Jones with giant cartoonish boxing gloves. And I felt like an idiot to boot.

It’s not a great picture. It’s posed, but off-center. Her hair was much shorter than usual, above her shoulders, and I didn’t like it much that way. But you couldn’t do endless takes in those days, and from the chin up it’s not bad. We both have passable smiles, which is actually pretty good for me. When I found it, I was happy enough to have it. We’re both wearing the awful custom beach-themed t-shirts and plastic leis. She’s standing slightly in front of me, and I have my right arm around her waist. Really, “around” is generous. “Vaguely in the vicinity of” is probably closer to reality. I think maybe my pinky and ring finger were touching the waistband of her jean shorts. The other two fingers are feigning contact, and my thumb isn’t even pretending. It’s just hanging out there in midair like a trapeze. She’s spent most of the evening crawling into the gap between my body and my arm and I’m too scared even to touch her. Terrified of a slightly misplaced hand or a missed cue. Or am I? Maybe that’s just what I tell myself. (Can I put my hand on her hip? If I do does that mean something?) Maybe I’m just freezing up at the thought of other people thinking we’re together, even when we’re not (are we?) because then I’m exposed, shattered.

“Is she your girlfriend?”

It’s not as though it would have been embarrassing. Quite the opposite. She was, and still is, good looking with a big smile and infectious laugh. The kind that comes out maybe too often, that might be hiding something. And those eyes, oh those eyes. They could put her picture by “doe eyed” in the dictionary and it wouldn’t capture it. Soft brown eyes that still make me melt. I lose myself in those eyes. I wasn’t afraid of being mistreated. I was afraid of being known.

When I noticed my hand in the picture, I assumed it was an issue of immaturity. We actually laughed about it when I shared the picture with her after finding it, like ha-ha, look how dumb I was at 18. But it wasn’t a question of not being sure what to do with my hands, nor was it an issue of confidence. My hands had managed to find appropriate locations before, with other girls, without difficulty or hesitation. It was her. I was terrified of slipping up, missing some unstated boundary, and losing everything.

Everything, at that point, was a lot. Middle school had been challenging. The kind of challenging that would be difficult to survive in an age of social media. So when we met at the bus stop the first day of freshman year, and she introduced herself to me, it was quite literally a life saver. After a year and a half as a pariah, someone wanted to talk to me. And it was a girl. An attractive girl. And it was genuine. We talked almost every morning. The next year, when I was assigned to a new stop closer to my house, I kept walking to hers, just to talk to her. It was the best part of my day.

The fact that most of our interactions were one-on-one rather than in a group, and largely private, probably made it easier to be our real selves and, eventually, to share more and more sensitive details than we otherwise would have. Junior year, she got a parking spot to go to the career center in the afternoons, so she drove me in the mornings. Around Thanksgiving, when I got my varsity jacket a few weeks after football season ended, she made fun of me for strutting around like a proud peacock. Anyone else and I would have died a little inside or maybe fought them. I was proud. I worked my ass off for three years for that jacket. Her, though, I knew it was good natured, and she was proud of me too. I also knew she was right.

Her dad was a car guy. He had a plow on his truck, and he would come plow my parents’ driveway in the winter. This was not a small job. The front yard was as long as a football field. Maybe he was doing it for her, but he kept doing it till he was too old to it anymore. I decided to believe he kept doing it just because. Senior year I drove myself, but we had a class together for the first time and, along with it, an excuse to hang out together. But we only hung out together occasionally. We weren’t really in the same social circles most of the time, especially as seniors. Our relationship was in the in-between times—the bus stop, the school hallway, the nights when nothing else was happening. The times when people are real. When the masks come off. When they’re genuinely themselves.

Unstated boundaries have always been a bit of an issue for us. Not exactly the problem of how to avoid crossing them, as it would be for true platonic friends. More the question of what it would mean if we did and, more importantly, what would happen one of us tried but was turned away. We always kind of drifted in the ambiguity, allowing for the possibility of more and acknowledging the tension but rarely acting on it. Anyway, she almost always had a boyfriend, and I sort of felt like it would be wrong to get in the middle of that. Or at least that’s what I told myself. And she generally had the next one lined up before she was done with the current one. I wasn’t interested in that. I knew what was coming, and I might have been afraid, but at least I had some self-respect. She had some growing up to do too, I think.

At some point in the evening, or maybe early the next morning, or whenever I got tired of people, I went to lay down on some foldable gym mats by the pull-out bleachers. I laid down on one with a small stack behind me as a pillow. I’m not sure if I ever went to sleep or not, but at some point, she laid down next to me and curled up with her head on my chest. Instead of putting an arm around her, like I should have done, I pretended to be asleep. (What does it mean? What if someone sees? What if she tells me I’m being gross because she doesn’t see me that way?). Someone came along and took a picture. She’s looking straight at the camera, eyes open, comfortable, safe. My eyes appear to be closed but if you look closely and zoom in you can see they are open just a bit. Looking at her, noticing the camera. Waiting for the picture to be taken because I want to remember this. For once, I knew what she thought, and I didn’t care what anyone else did. I didn’t want the moment to end.

There was one other time like that. I think it was around Christmas, or at least it was cold out. We were watching some movie in her basement. Maybe Die Hard. I was never big on action movies anyway and wasn’t paying attention. It was dark and she cuddled up on the couch next to me. I don’t remember whose head was on whose lap, but it was pretty much a perfect moment. Just absolute contentment and peace. There’s a song called “Cigarettes” by Lucky Boys Confusion. It has a line that goes “watching movies in the dark/but really listening to the rain” that always reminds me of this. The movie was totally superfluous. Usually, it’s the Lumineers that remind me of her, because they tend toward the bittersweet and nostalgic. “Cleopatra,” about a woman who missed out on her chance to be with the man she loved when he left but tells him she would “marry you in an instant, damn your wife/I’d be your mistress just to have you around.” “Gloria,” who says, “I lie awake and pray you don’t lie awake for me.” “Gale Song,” about a guy who left home and was replaced because he was “ten thousand miles away” and had to let go of the girl after finding himself “standing in line” for love but still loving her anyway despite having “fell apart with his broken heart.” “Stubborn Love,” explaining how it’s possible to “still love her, I don’t really care” even after she’s torn a hole in you that can’t be repaired.

The lyrics to “Sleep on the Floor” hit especially hard. The song is about a road trip, or more generally leaving the place where you’re from, asking the girl to pack a shirt and a toothbrush, and “decide on me, decide on us.” The summer before my senior year of college I decided to drive around to visit some of the law schools I was thinking of applying to. I was going to make a big loop, going all the way from Detroit down to North Carolina, up the east coast, and then West across upstate New York and back through Canada. I wanted her to come with me. Whatever I said, she didn’t understand. I think maybe she thought I was just going on a tour somewhere local. But to me, it felt like a breakup. Like she was saying there was no future for us. Not together as a couple and I wasn’t sure as anything else.

This was in June or July, and on the heels of another rejection. The previous March of my junior year she had come to see me at school in Chicago. This was unusual, but not unprecedented. She had come out to Washington DC early in my sophomore year when I was going to school there, before I transferred. It was Veterans Day and we both had a long weekend. We stayed in the same bed, and I drew a big X on the whiteboard on the door so my roommate would go away, but nothing happened, at least as far as I remember, and then I forgot about it for years. This time was different.

She was going to Indianapolis for a regional business club meeting, and somehow decided Chicago was on her way, and I could drive her down there. Obviously, she just wanted to visit me. Some foreign student was with her. Anyway, this other girl stayed in the couch in the main part of the room, and she stayed in my bed with me in the smaller part. My roommate Josh graciously found somewhere else to be. I don’t know how it started but our heads ended up next to each other and we started making out. She told me years later she had already decided to have sex with me before she even got there. It wasn’t the best. We were nervous. Neither of us was inexperienced but, as she says, “there were real feelings involved.” Probably more than with anyone else up to that point, certainly for me and maybe for both of us. It was her. It sort of had to happen. The tension was too thick. We sort of talked about it after and she said we were “seeing each other,” whatever that means. I didn’t love it—it still felt ambiguous—but the long-distance thing was a problem. A week or two after that I went to Cabo for spring break. I could have hooked up every night, but I had no interest in anyone else. “If you were so in love with me why did you leave me?” she asked, years later. “I didn’t know you were mine to leave.” At least that’s what I tell myself. Even when both of us were acting tough to the rest of the world, we could still be vulnerable with each other. As long as it wasn’t about each other.

She came back in May for the spring formal. Someone referred to her (making a reasonable assumption) as my girlfriend. I didn’t correct him, but she balked. The formal was at a hotel. I got a room. She wore a sparkly green dress. She brought a friend for my buddy Jason. But she said she didn’t want to have sex with me because she was seeing some new guy. I was devastated. Not so much the sex, although I wasn’t happy about it, but mostly that whatever happened before apparently didn’t mean anything. It was just being horny, or bored, or something we just needed to get through before we both exploded (it was, but that’s not the point). So the road trip thing a few weeks later was kind of the last straw for me. I was hurt. Badly. I got in my car and drove 12 hours straight to Winston-Salem. I don’t think we talked much senior year, even though I finished early and came back home in March. We did see each other around Christmas because I had been working that fall on getting a spot as a JAG officer in the Marines. I had gotten my acceptance to law school in early November. By December, law school acceptance in hand, I had the spot at Officer Candidate School. My parents were not happy, but I was determined. Over Christmas break, we hung out and she told me I was better than that, basically that I was destined for more important things. I withdrew the next week. She saved me a second time. I was heartbroken but she still cared and was still looking out for me. And I was still grateful for it and still wanted her to.

The third picture I found in one of my parents’ photo albums. It was taken a week or two before the others after the national honor society induction ceremony. I think my dad took it, or maybe her mom. There’s some huge glare, so either is possible. We’re standing close, closer than in the posed photo from senior night. I’m not sure where my hand is. It should be on her back, but that seems unlikely. I remember distinctly her leaning into me close, so the side of her breast was fully resting against my chest. Very intentionally. So our parents can take pictures! I was shattered. Shattered but loved. And very confused. I froze. It turns out tactile memory is a very strong type of memory. The only other physical connection we had up to that point was she once licked my face at a house party, basically on a dare, and called it a cow-kiss. It was weird, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it was better than nothing. But also another missed opportunity. I should have just told her she did it wrong and planted one on her lips in return.

It’s interesting we feel so safe around each other. I’m told there’s a lot of mutual protection going on. I didn’t realize it until decades later, but she also was coming off some traumatic experiences just before we met. And without ever talking about what had happened to either of us, we just started acting in a certain way toward each other. As if, when those who were supposed to protect us wouldn’t or couldn’t, then we would protect each other. Little wonder she ended up a special agent with a three-letter agency and I ended up in national-security law and in the military. She worries about me when I’m overseas. I worry about her every time she goes to work.

Labels are elusive here, and inevitably incomplete if not outright wrong. We know each other almost too well. In some ways we act like exes, even though we never even truly dated. In other ways we act like siblings. There’s no name for it. The closest depiction I’ve seen is Season 1 of Andor. The guy shows home after some significant period away. The girl is happy to see him and angry he left and that he keeps leaving but is resigned to the idea that that’s how it is and there’s no use fighting it. There is a strong hint of some sort of past, but their relationship now has transcended it. She has a new boyfriend, anyway. They know they can’t be together, sometimes find each other frustrating, but can also communicate without words and would still take a bullet for each other.

In my first year of law school, when I was still reeling from what I understood as rejection, I started dating the girl who I would later marry. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. And in my haste to appear attractive and desirable I told her that I had been dating someone (or at least hooking up with someone) up until shortly before school started, just a few weeks earlier. And to make the lie easy to maintain, I made it a real person. I made it her. I wonder, now, if that choice was intentional—if I was also burning the ships. In any event, this naturally turned into a giant dumpster fire and made it almost impossible to have any real contact for almost a decade. I didn’t invite her to my wedding. She missed my kids when they were young. She came to visit once with books for them and I couldn’t make time for her. She didn’t invite me to her wedding. We didn’t talk the entire time she was pregnant. It wasn’t until much later, after she was married, that we got a little bit of a course correction.

At some point before Covid, in one of several text conversations complaining (justifiably) about my absence from her life, she signed off with a “love ya.” I knew this wasn’t just for me, or particularly meaningful at all. But for once, finally, I took the jump and responded “love you too.” Followed immediately, so there would be no ambiguity this time, with “mean it.” This set off a long series of messages and a couple phone calls. We talked about how deeply we cared about each other and regretted our imperfections and how we respected where each of us had ended up. But then she had a baby and there was Covid and nothing much happened for a long time. And I still hadn’t managed to fix things at home to mitigate the awkwardness and suspicion I had created years earlier.

Then, I deployed. We talked a little bit when I was gone, but after I came back, I made it a point to reiterate how I felt. It the midst of risk and death I decided that if something should happen to me I didn’t want her to wonder. And when a friend’s husband unexpectedly died while I happened to be overseas the next year, we talked again, for hours, and tried to smooth over some of our past transgressions and got a little closer to the truth. One day, she called me asking about the rules on medical retirement (she was diagnosed with a serious chronic condition a few years earlier). It turned out she was ok, nothing was imminent, but for about two days I thought she was seriously ill and I felt like I’d lost a part of myself.

About two years after that, her dad passed away. I was there the couple days leading up to it. It was both the hardest and most important thing I did for anyone in a long time. Seeing her in pain and being unable to fix it felt awful. Grief is bad, mixing it with powerlessness is worse. But, in a way, it probably brought us closer together. Not in the way I would choose, but you don’t get to choose these things. Perhaps, like the deployment was for me, it pushed her to open up as well and acknowledge at 43 what I had wanted to hear since I was 14. And while I was there, finally, a fourth picture—the first in 25 years. We both look sad and exhausted—and much older, but I also think both grateful that we each have someone in this world that cares about us unconditionally, knows us in a way no one else does, and can make us feel like we’re kids again.

They say you become a new person every ten years. Seems like maybe that’s true. We’ve known each other 30 and we’ve invented and reinvented ourselves three times. The first ten years we spent deciding if we were even willing to decide if we were right for each other, because neither of us was willing to give up what we had—a foundation of mutual care so strong that even reciprocal heartbreak couldn’t dislodge it. The second ten we spent mostly recovering from the first, trying to learn to live without each other and otherwise establishing ourselves. And the Covid-infected ten just ending now (which feels like maybe five) trying to figure out how to reintegrate our lives in a new way, with spouses and kids and aging parents and a lot more distance, and, importantly, a lot more maturity, openness, and honesty. Too much time tiptoeing around our feelings and not nearly enough time enjoying how we are right for each other, in whatever way that is, whether there’s a name for it or not. A love built on an unshakeable foundation, that’s steady and solid and unhurried. That transcends romance. The oldest and perhaps safest and certainly most enigmatic of relationships.

Few know this sort of love; fewer understand. One day, we will pass out of living memory, and no one will know. There are no monuments here. No “dearly beloved” written on headstones. No rings or children or mortgage records or any of the typical fare of marriage and partnerships. No recollections of family vacations and childhood squabbles, as among siblings. Weekends away, like with college buddies, are out of bounds. What we do have to show for it is four pictures. And maybe, if we’re lucky, another 30 years to get it right.