under exposure

In this one we’re like any teenage snapshot couple, drunk with careless infatuation. I proudly wear my “Century of Women on Top” tee shirt; you wear your shy smile. We’re holding the old Polaroid camera out in front of us, and your cheek, complete with the dimples you always tried to hide, is pressed next to mine. This is the photo I’d scan and email to my friends back home, my mom. This print’s fuzzy brightness doesn’t reveal a few hours earlier when we would have been found in the emergency room after the police were called to the scene of one of your theatrical suicide threats, nor does it have any recollection of that shrill terror that by something miraculous pushed up through my throat and echoed off the side of that old brick building when I thought I had lost you. It doesn’t show the part when I was crying and tried to call out to that man across the street for help, or when you wouldn’t even look at me as you manipulated words into blameful incantations and continued on at that frighteningly determined pace. It doesn’t know about the bruise that will develop on my arm the next morning where you had grabbed me and pushed me away from you when I was desperately trying to chase after you, to save you. I only ever wanted to save you. This Polaroid doesn’t understand that I would even willingly forget my own name for a time in order to try to teach you the hope hidden inside the spelling of yours. And neither the film nor flash know about the hot shower we shared after the whole ordeal was over that night, how your shivering body melted into my arms as heavy beads of water pounded on our skin, and how I forgot about the deadly dominance you had cast over me as I sensed the powerlessness in your pulse.