Valamity!

…”Our” being yours (the reader’s) and our (the bloggers’) acquaintance, or “our” being mine (the blogger’s) and Seth’s (the other blogger’s) acquaintance — it really doesn’t matter, because it could go either way.

Since we probably won’t get around to writing a decent “about” page until well into next year and both of us have suddenly been hit harder-better-faster-stronger with schoolwork (the joys of senior year and college!), I thought it might be kind of nice to take a moment and tell a little bit of our story here. It’s only a tiny facet of our bizarre but awesome relationship, but I think I managed to encapsulate…something.

If we’re LiveJournal friends, you might have already seen this. This is the essay I wrote for the UCh*cago as a response to the prompt “tell us what a picture looks like and what it wants.” It’s actually worded much more nicely than that, but paranoia forces me to rephrase the prompt and censor the college name in fear of crazed prospies resorting to Google for material. Not that anybody can steal this — it’s much too personal for that.

This is about us — a little bit about how we got to know each other, a little bit of who we are. Have fun reading it, and feel free to make fun of us afterwards.

***

Meeting and departure, his fingers intertwined with mine, sad smiles side by side as we prepared to say goodbye; standing side by side, our thoughts and emotions standing in parallel, our ever-growing connection pulsing with glorious vitality… o, glorious reality! The memory of the moment and everything it entailed are still fresh in my mind, yet barely this much can be seen in the tiny 3″ x 5″ portrait sitting on my desk — and even then, I’m unsure of what perceptions I create from recollection versus what I see in front of me. But really, can the stuff of hopes and dreams be expressed in a digital mosaic of tiny colored squares? Can the essence of love be captured in a flat, single-perspective image? You would have had to have been there — to have been one of us — to truly know.

Every picture has its story, and this particular picture carries quite a bit of extra baggage. It sits in a simple black frame on my desk; he sent it to me about a week after it was taken, secreted away within a box full of books and clothes and tokens of love. It wasn’t actually his picture to begin with — the JPEG was captured by my own digital camera in New York City and moved to my laptop, delivered via e-mail to a small town in Nebraska, copied onto a smart card inserted into another digital camera, the camera brought to Wal-Mart in order to create the print, the print put in a frame and shipped by UPS to my front door. All of this to capture the culmination of months of anticipation, weeks of planning, and a long and tortuous process of pulling strings and nudging weights until we were sure everything would fall into place just so — just so!

Yet despite all our delicate machinations, the moment of the snapshot was not as perfect as it appears. In the sides of the original, a young girl and her mother scramble up the steps in haste, unaware of their candid obtrusion, and several other less conspicuous figures minding their own business mill around and about the stairs. But their extraneous lives were of no importance to us, self-centered couple that we were — this was our moment to be beautiful! — and so I cropped them out. Still, there was something else, something with deeper roots than clarity or composition or even narcissism, that compelled me to extract them so thoroughly from the image. You see, the girl and her mother, in their frenetically blurred haste, happened to reflect an aspect of that day we felt better off forgetting. Cutting out their movement leaves only us, still and silent, suspended on a page in time — unreminded of the fact that less than one hour later, we wouldn’t be physically together for twelve months; less than one day later, there would be nearly two thousand miles between us once again.

Society has a tendency to disdain teenagers who insist that they’re in love. “Love,” they call it, with their scoffs and air quotes, gesturing derisively towards our hormonal vicissitude and the stereotypical ephemerality of the adolescent state. Nevertheless, I’ve never met any teenager who actually cared about any of this, and not even the most penetrating outside scorn could have deflated our spirits in that moment. Neither of us is fortunate enough to be gifted in the area of vertical capacity (read: we’re short), but I don’t think anybody would guess that I only stand at 62 inches based upon this picture. Both of us, I imagine, had become so inundated with the metaphor of feeling “lifted in triumph” that we somehow managed to transpose it into a fitting optical illusion — a larger than life moment, indeed! Although it most certainly goes against all logic and is at best romanticized symbolism, I still find it easy to believe that the sheer exultation of those few hours was more than enough to make it physically manifest in such a way: we had not only personally overcome the usual doubters of society, but prevailed over Time and Distance themselves, who seemed to have been making bets against us since the hazy times when we first discovered each other. People find it strange to find out that we began as an (horror upon horrors) “online couple” (and even now, I feel awkward admitting it forthright), but those tenuous strings of binary provided a form around which we built a connection far stronger than any material metaphor can describe — but perhaps, I thought, the best metaphor for it would be the story of this picture itself.

Thus it all comes down to this one image, this portrait of two gangling teenagers who quietly and unconsciously transmitted their souls to each other via fiber optics until they gave away so much of themselves that they simply had to make their relationship real. And after they met, they took a computerized version of themselves and created a piece of reality from that, too — a little piece of pseudo-reality that sits on my desk, to remind me every day of what I have.

A picture, by itself, wants nothing more than the intentions behind it.

This picture wants to be.

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