Object Reading posted for Elle Carroll

        I have one framed photo in my bedroom. The photo is an image of me standing in the aisle of a gas station market. I’m wearing a dark green jump suit and carrying a black tote bag. In my hand I have my car keys and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. My body is facing away from the camera as I walk in the opposite direction, but my head is turned back and I’m looking into the lens. My face is partially obscured by my hand, which is flipping the bird. The lighting is a sickly green thanks to the fluorescent bulbs overhead, and the bottom right corner is blocked by the photographer’s finger, who accidentally obscured part of the lens when he snapped the photo. The photographer is my ex-boyfriend. We broke up last September.

        I will be the first to acknowledge that for one thing, having a framed photo of yourself is weird, and for another, having a framed photo of yourself taken by your ex is extremely weird. My basic reasoning behind having the image in plain view is that it is from a time in my life where I was effervescently happy and obscenely in love, and when I see the image, I remember what that felt like. By this logic, its value is primarily nostalgic. When I see this image, I see my happiest self living during a gloriously happy part of my life. Seeing it from his perspective through the image in tandem with my memory of the image being taken, I remember how ridiculously into each other we were. It’s entrenched in the past and in the memories (however altered they may be) of retroactively perceived good times.

        Still it would be easy to tuck away this photo with the thousands of others from that point in my life. I have so many photos of him from when we were together, and several of myself taken by him. So why this one? Why bring this image into the trenches of my everyday, where I’ll at the very least glance at it on a regular basis?

        My best theory is that the photo now serves as something aspirational. I want to feel this feeling and feel this way about someone again. I want to get to a place where things felt like the just fit with someone else again. It’s basic inductive reasoning: it happened in the past, therefore it could happen again. This photo reminds me that there are possible similar experiences in the future. I’m chasing the emotional dragon, essentially.

        After we split, I threw myself into my work and studies and stopped dating. And, well, things could get lonely. Seeing that image upon arriving home to sleep alone on a night I had no interest in sleeping alone reminded me that, at the very least, I’m not wholly undesirable. Thus the image works as an antidote to the occasional despair of the present. Since nothing but the edge of my ex’s finger is in the frame, it’s easy to minimize him from the context of the image in my twisted line of reasoning. It’s an admittedly logic-free way to calm my fears about my inadequacies in terms of partaking in a monogamous, romantic relationship (read: the modern romance myth) that will supposedly fulfill my needs. Given how I am trying to un-learn the structure of monogamy and romantic love that I’ve been told will complete me, it strikes me as strange that I keep the photo on display -- even for nostalgic value. So it goes.