I've been learning, this past week, about a woman I barely knew. I've been looking at pictures of her, so dynamically joyous and awkward, severe and beautiful, hearing about her loves and quirks and fears. I barely knew her, having met her only twice (first at her own wedding and then again, a year later, at my brother's), and yet this morning her face, heart breaking, woke me before dawn.
Hours later, well after full light, I headed down the hill to meet friend Freddy for our Saturday morning walk. We made it through our weekly catch-up on each other's goings-on, him filling me in on his nephew and his classes and his music, me relaying this past week with only the barest hint of tears.
We headed north, meandering up the east side of Fort Tryon Park, reveling in the surprising warmth after a month of bitter cold. We bought cookies at the farmers' market and munched contentedly as we walked up past baseball diamonds and playgrounds and fields of geese. Eventually we reached the edge of the water, frozen in great buckling slabs of ice -- but cracked and melting just the littlest bit along the shore.
I wanted to share that moment, that icy thawing moment, with the husband this woman left behind. I wanted to bring some sort of comfort to this man who's been around since I was just a tiny tow-headed girl, and who many years ago helped my family navigate through this same icy tundra of grief.
Nick carries in his head a picture of me from many, many years ago. It belonged to his then-girlfriend (an old and dear friend of mine going back to grade school days), who pulled it out to show him not long after she'd first introduced us. I've never seen this picture myself, but somehow we got to talking about it one evening last week during a larger conversation about old photographs and the different ways in which we are caught in them.
I'd been rummaging in old boxes and had found a small stack of pictures taken by an old boyfriend. He took good pictures, that boy of mine, of many, many things: darkening skies and fractured trees and blizzards and architectural oddities and beloved friends and me.
My favorite of his pictures of me is this one, in which I was so far away (or he was) that it is mostly just empty space -- wooden dock, open water, hazy shoreline and hills and sky -- and me, a distant body, in the midst of all that beautifully suffocating air.
I love this picture, but it also makes me feel like I must have been infinitely tiny then. Like I must have felt very fragile and small, out there in the middle of such nothingness, lapping water and splintery old wood and flat sky holding more force than my barely there, nearly indiscernible self ever could.
Nick described his particular picture with phrases that made me want to cry.
I watched him from across the table, our dinner plates pushed aside and our second round of margaritas dripping condensed water between us. His hands shaped the air in front of him, and he looked at them as he worked through his memory of that picture, dredging up what he had thought of it back before we knew enough to love each other.
"You were a lot skinnier then. And you looked so tired," he said. "Caught in a moment of being very far away, of being very still. Of maybe working to hold something in, or keep something at bay. I don't think you knew that anyone else was there to see."
I don't remember this picture being taken, but I imagine it was during the latter part of '96, during a weekend of fleeing the city, of wanting to be somewhere home-like and safe, my friend's childhood house. I was very tired back then, and doing things that were not very good for me.
This was years before that old boyfriend and his pictures, and before a hard-earned ability to shroud myself sometimes with distance and solitude and quiet, empty spaces.
My favorite picture now, taken just last month, is this ridiculous and beautiful thing. It is up close and immediate and filled with laughter (there may have been tickling involved), and the air is bright, and my hair is blowing across my face, tangling in my glasses and catching in my throat, in my teeth.
This new picture, in all its tickly-forced goofy glory, was taken by someone for whom I want to be entirely present in ways I haven't really wanted, haven't really felt capable of wanting, before.
