lonely lesbian valentine's day

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I am seventeen in this photo, and the pixels blur our faces as we lie in her bed. The sun is insistent as it shines into her childhood bedroom, begging to be noticed, but all I can see is her. Her magnificently plush, baby pink comforter is draped lightly over both of our bodies. I lay with my head in her lap and she brushes my hair back from my face. I imagine that I probably told her “I love you,” for the thousandth time with a smile so big and beautiful and true on my face. She is wearing my favorite sweatshirt, a bright yellow one I bought from Goodwill. And I wear hers, purple and red and probably once worn by someone’s grandmother. We have the same hairstyle - dark brown hair with bangs that sit just below our eyebrows - a symbol of how intertwined we were. We are both gazing into her vanity mirror, which is old and uncleaned. You can see the evidence of her life splayed out on that flat, white surface. A hair straightener I insisted she shouldn’t use, a cheap, scented hand sanitizer she stole from my purse, necklaces and rings and bracelets and ribbons, and several trinkets that I gifted her in that first year. The walls are bright blue and I still remember the layout of her room like I just visited it for the last time, but that was four years ago.

Now, in this photo, she is seventeen. It is Halloween the following year and we sit outside her best friend’s grandparents’ house, passing out candy to toddlers in Spiderman costumes. She is wearing a white dress and pink and gold fairy wings, and I tell her that she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It is pitch black outside, but I have turned my flash on to capture the shimmer that lives in her eyes. Her cheeks are pink and her lips look soft. I remember so much, but I do not remember how it felt to kiss them. She looks at me with a wide, shy smile - my favorite kind - and I think that she once thought I hung the stars for her. I tried and tried and tried.

She broke my heart that year and then, years later, I am laying with my head in a new girl’s lap with blonde hair and no bangs and an affinity for impressions. We are in an Atlanta hotel room and she looks at me. My nails are painted red and my fingers rest delicately on her thighs; it looks like I am sleeping, but with a soft, partial smile on my face. She is the one in purple this time and I am in a white shirt that I got at a basement show in my college town. The itchy, stiff hotel sheets lay beneath us and do not comfort me like the pink duvet did. We are drunk, just having come back from a bar that I have forgotten the name of, and waiting on a cheese pizza that I remember tasting like the stars or heaven or her mouth, they were all the same then. Her eyes are glassy and there is an ugly painting of unknown flowers behind her head. I do not remember the layout of this hotel room but I do remember sleeping next to her, too afraid to touch. 

I am in Atlanta again except this time she lives here. I am twenty two in this photograph and so is she and we sit side by side, touching thighs and shoulders, on the concrete steps that lead to her apartment. We both have red hair and bangs now and only our faces and the cigarettes we smoke are visible. The flash of my digital camera is on, as it is probably close to midnight, and it illuminates our glassy, bloodshot eyes. You cannot see the plastic cups full of alcohol that sit on the steps behind us. After we took this picture, we talked about love until I cried and then she kissed me for a long time. We only stopped because people kept walking past us on the sidewalk and it was the middle of July and close to one million degrees. I think I loved her, but then she moved to New York and everything got complicated. 

I am still twenty two and my life is a series of deleting and then redownloading dating apps. In this photograph, it is just me and it is the first thing you see on my Hinge profile. My hair is still bright red and I have had bangs all this time. My cheeks are painted maroon and I have curled my eyelashes. My lips are pink and puckered and long for someone’s kiss. You can see my dirty clothes hamper just beside my head in the background. I’ve met someone, but it is too early to talk about it too much without ruining everything. We have no photographs together yet, but I hope that changes soon. Last month I sat on her couch eating hot honey wings and trying to work up the courage to kiss her. She held my hand and ran her thumb over my skin so delicately I thought she might think I would run if she moved too forcefully. She eventually slotted her lips against mine and touched my skin with reality television playing in the background and the night was filled with giggles and shy smiles.

In our first photograph together, we are in the dingy gay bar’s bathroom. There is a sign on the door with huge, all-caps font yelling at us to go in one at a time, but we cannot be separated for even one minute. We stand in front of a dirty mirror with words I can’t make out engraved into the glass. The paper towel holder gapes open, revealing the large brown roll of the scratchy, stiff material. She holds onto her phone as I hold onto her, the silver rings adorning both of our fingers shimmering in the yellow light. I still have bright red hair and bangs and her brown, curly hair is tucked into a gray beanie. Our smiling cheeks are pressed together and her skin always feels so soft. I have my father’s oversized black leather jacket draped over my shoulders while she wears a bright orange sweatshirt and has my black and white gingham bag slung over her shoulder. Every time she saw me with this bag she found a way to hold it for me. After we took this picture, we kissed each other urgently, a little drunk on green tea shots and the feeling of being in public together for the first time. She held and kissed me in front of the whole bar that night, called me hers to strangers, introduced me to her friends. This felt like the beginning of something. 

Now I take photos with my red digital camera that I have had for almost a decade. I am straddling her lap and our faces are not visible. I have the lens pointed downward, showing off only her hands with their bitten nails peeking out of her cherry-red sweatshirt and delicately entering the yellow lace underwear I had put on that night just for her. My pale thighs, littered with tattoos and two half-finished stick-and-pokes wrap around her waist. It was New Year’s Eve and I had Ubered from the bar I was at with my friends to be with her, hoping she would touch me like this. I was drunk off of at least three glasses of crisp, bubbly champagne and had wished she was near me all night. I wanted to kiss her when the clock struck twelve; this was almost as good. The next morning I woke up, damp with sweat, in her bed and we drove to her friend’s house to walk her dog together. She held my hand and kissed me on the sidewalks and talked to me about a restaurant she wanted to take me to. She kissed me goodbye before she left for a trip to New York. It felt like there was a future with her within my reach. It quickly slipped from my grasp when she returned and told me that she couldn’t be what I needed right now. I am not in love but I would like to be. 

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