Photographs and Romance

Sara Yi

During the summer, I had a brief but thrilling fling with a beautiful, questionably older man.

He was a photographer—an artist, he’d call himself. Having almost a decade on me, I was intoxicatingly and irrevocably captivated by him. I spent scorching summer nights wandering his hallways, gazing up at the hundreds of photographs covering his walls. They formed a timeline I could never quite comprehend, spanning decades, repeating the same grinning faces across the entirety of his life.

My eyes consumed them with fervor: a kindergarten class photo, prom night with his first girlfriend, a wedding where he stood beside the groom, beaming. Each image felt like proof—not just that he had existed, but that he had stayed. He had made lifelong friendships, experienced heartbreak, watched people marry, all within the steady familiarity of his hometown. He was a tree, rooted in one place, rings expanding outward year after year.

I admired this. I envied it.

By the time I graduated high school, I had lived in eight different cities. This is my default fun fact, delivered with rehearsed casualness during icebreakers, but if I sit with it for too long, I feel the phantom ache my heart still carries from all the goodbyes I’ve had to utter.

The first time I moved, I was nine. When I told my friends, we held each other and cried. Within days, my family packed our life into the trunk of a 2004 Ford Explorer and left California behind. Despite being nine, I felt in my soul the dull ache of grief, and I knew and understood the foreverness of such.

The second time, I was twelve. When I told my boyfriend—we were still figuring out what to call each other—we cried, too. I left North Carolina with his hoodie clutched to my chest and the same ache following me.

The third time, I was thirteen. I cried. My friends didn’t. I had only known them for a few months, and I didn’t even know some of their last names.

By the fourth move, I had learned efficiency. I said goodbye to Springfield, Ohio and hello to Cincinnati, a much shorter distance than the others, but I refused to be fooled. This time, I did not let myself dream of overstaying. If my time here wasn’t guaranteed, why make the leaving harder?

So when I met him, I loved him carefully.

As summer surrendered to the colder months, I began detaching with practiced grace. I mourned the relationship before it had officially ended, packing our inside jokes and forehead kisses and promises of backpacking in Europe into neat little mental boxes, ready to be shipped away. He noticed.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he told me one night, watching me prepare myself.

I couldn’t explain that this was all I knew.

I collect grief like souvenirs, as if without the dull ache I have no proof of my presence in the places I’ve called home. Life doesn’t stop to mourn me, and I resent that. I leave, and someone else sleeps in my bedroom. My professors greet new students. My first kiss becomes one of many. The world keeps turning, indifferent.

Weeks after we ended things, I found the photographs he’d taken of me still tucked away in my apartment. I thought I had been thorough. I spread them across my floor, and the absence returned, sharp and familiar. I taped them to my wall. Then, with the kind of impulsive determination you can only feel after a bottle of red and a Lana Del Rey vinyl, I scavenged for my own.

Me at seven, grinning on the shores of Santa Monica.
A Snapchat selfie with my North Carolina boyfriend.
My sweet sixteenth at a Cincinnati Cheesecake Factory.
Junior prom.
Dorm move-in.
Fake IDs.
Graduations.
Joint birthdays.

One by one, they climbed the wall above my bed.

His wall had been curated—steady, intentional, easy on the eyes. Mine was scattered, uneven, transient. Cities overlapped. Faces appeared once and disappeared forever.

I no longer remember the sound of his voice, but I remember his photographs. I remember the jealousy I felt, knowing he had never learned to leave the way I had. I feel restless once I exceed a year in a single apartment, once I’ve memorized the shoddily painted ceilings and the way he smelled and the indents in the hardwood and the feeling of his hands tracing my back.

I used to think grief was what followed me across cities and years. But standing there, wine-drunk and nostalgic, staring at my wall, I realized it wasn’t grief at all.

The photographs didn’t argue with me. They just stayed.