Frames

David was lying down in my crumpled up white comforter in his yellow boxers, humming “Purple Haze.” It was a sunny summer morning, slanted sunlight in my room. I was working on a Calculus problem set.

         “Come here,” he said.

With my head on the left side of his tan, untrimmed chest and my skinny pale arm strewn over his ribcage, I inhaled his sweet gingery smell.

“What’s your story?” David had asked me on the sunny afternoon we met. We were at Borders Café in Harvard Square for my cousin Tony’s twenty-second birthday. David’s first question, like him, was simple and complicated. The rules were clear from day one: I had my story, and he had his.

His story was that he had broken up with Lizzie a week before meeting me on a June afternoon. Mine: I foolishly believed in his melancholy green gaze.

His distant voice interrupted my light nap.  “You like old things,” he said.

“What old things?” I asked, propping my head on arm and looking at him. 

“Like letters and wax stamps and pictures.”  He said. 

I said, “Pictures you don’t get to see right away.”

“I like you,” he said. 

That is what I miss most, waking up happy, starting my day next to David.

Those mornings were never completely mine. Lizzie would text message him on most of those mornings. I didn’t know what the messages said. 



**

Tony and I were renting a house in Church Street, about five minutes away from Harvard Square, which we decided to keep for senior year. 

         “How’s David?” he asked, as he shredded a Bertucci’s bread roll into messy fragments on his plate. I meticulously sliced my own bread into two halves and looked up at his red Ray-Ban wayfarer-clad eyes.

         “I like him a lot,” I answered, smiling.

         “Keep it casual,” he said. I squeezed one of the bread halves in my hand, crumbling it to pieces and frowned at him.

         “Why can’t you be happy for me?”

         “I’m happy for you, kid, just be careful,” he said, stuffing a piece of bread into his mouth. I looked at Tony, waiting for him to continue.

         “He’s over Lizzie,” I said, as I picked at my chipped, red nail polish, “he gets over things quickly.”

         “Doesn’t mean he’s not on the rebound,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the waiter who brought our food. 

I stared at my plate and twirled my spaghetti around the red and watery tomato sauce. Tony took a bite of pizza and leaned back against on his chair.

         “I’m not his rebound,” I finally said, biting my bottom lip and looking at the people passing by.



**



          On the first day of fall semester, David arrived at my door to walk me to class. 

         “I have a surprise for you,” he said, taking out a disposable camera from his pocket. I reached over for the camera and snapped a picture of him standing at the bottom of the stairs, with the sun illuminating his black, curly hair and his tan arms. He was wearing a yellow “Beatles” shirt and beige shorts, and he was leaning on to the handrail of my porch, shielding sunlight from his eyes. I often remember his ironic half-smile in that picture. He never liked smiling for pictures; he said it made the moment seem unnatural.          

“Twenty-six pictures to document your life, Hannah” he said as he came up the stairs and placed his arms around my waist.

         “Twenty-six pictures to document us,” I answered, looking into his green eyes and grazing my hand over the light stubble of his cheek. He took the camera from my hand and stretched his arm out to take a picture of us. I was wearing a light blue dress and my black hair cascaded over my shoulders as we both smiled at the camera, hoping those pictures would last forever.

**



“You’re taller and thinner,” David said to me while we showered together on a September Wednesday morning, “I love your body.”

He smiled at me and moved me out of the way so that he could get under the shower. I stared at the water dripping from his hair and without a word, got out of the shower.

“Hey, why’d you leave?” he asked. I wrapped my white towel around my body and stared at my wet reflection.

“I’m done.” I looked at my reflection frowning back at me and sighed before going to my room to get dressed.

Being with David meant I had to live up to a ghost. I inched my way around the ghost of Lizzie.

**

The leaves had started to turn orange and brown. It was Halloween night. David’s phone was off. I fell back on my couch in my sailor costume.

Tony was dressed as an elf. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, removing my sailor hat and scratching at my scalp.

“Come to John’s with me.” 

         I inched back into the corner of the sofa and looked into the mirror on the wall.          “The way it works is, guys are like dogs, and if you let them get away with shit, they’re going to keep doing it,” Tony explained.

         “I don’t want to lose him,” I answered, looking at my cousin’s reflection.

         Tony looked at his watch.

         I slumped down and cupped my cheeks between my hands. “Guys are like dogs?”

         “I have to go to the party,” Tony said impatiently. “I’m going to bring you a red velvet cupcake tomorrow, Hannah,” he added with a smile.

         When I woke up the next day, there was a message from David asking me out to brunch. I accepted, determined to ask him about the night before. We got a table at Au Bon Pain—he uncharacteristically pulled my chair out for me. Seeing his half-smile and holding his hand, I got weak when I should have been strong. He told me I was beautiful, even while I shoved an onion roll into my mouth. I really wanted that cupcake.



         

**



         “I love fall,” I said. We were sitting at a little round café table by the window, and I was staring at the coat-clad people rushing by. I focused on a little boy who was kicking a neat pile of leaves with his brown boots. He reminded me of Oliver Twist. I snapped a picture of him a few seconds before David’s beeping phone made me look away. 

         “Lizzie’s going on some trip to Africa,” he explained, smiling and reaching over the table to grab my hands, “she just wants to save the world, you know?” 

         I turned to Oliver Twist. He jumped around, laughing at the burgundy leaves, which merrily danced around him like scattered ballerinas. I wanted to be a kid again, to laugh and jump—to be seven.

“Wow, you guys still talk a lot.” I finally said, taking a gulp of coffee. It burned my tongue. I clenched my fingers around the steaming mug anyway.

“She doesn’t have many friends, Hannah. She needs me.”

I nodded slowly and turned back to the window. Oliver Twist was gone, and the neat pile of leaves was scattered all over the sidewalk. David took my hand, his fingers frigid against mine. He liked his coffee cold, even in the winter.



**



“Why aren’t you going out with David tonight?” Tony asked me on a Saturday night in late November. He was sitting on top of the green marble kitchen counter, eating my dumplings from my favorite sketchy Chinese restaurant.

“Hey, that’s my food!” I whined. 

“Sorry,” Tony said with his mouth full of dumpling, “so where’s David?” he asked again. 

I ignored his question and stood over the kitchen sink, scrubbing a week’s worth of dirty dishes and pans.

“Whatever. Listen, nobody plays poker on a Saturday night,” Tony said before stuffing the last dumpling dripping with soy sauce into his mouth.

“He didn’t say poker, he said guys’ night out,”

“Oh yeah? Then why am I sitting at home, eating your food?” he said.

“Why are you still eating my food?” I whined, scrubbing the encrusted Frosted Flakes off of a bowl in the sink.

“Do you want to come out with me?” he suggested, leaving his dirty plate on the counter as he jumped off.

“No”

“Why?”

“I need to watch Jersey Shore,”

“Would you be pissed if I tell you David is out with Lizzie?” he asked.

“Is he?” I asked.

“It’s a hypothetical question,” he pressed on.

“It’s fine, Tony, I trust him.” 

“You didn’t answer the question.” he said, “Anyway, I’m off,” Tony said as he put his coat on.

“Have fun,” I said to him as he shut the front door and I reached for his plate, dirty with my leftovers.



**

David and I walked over the river bridge, where the orange sun illuminated the Charles’ River. The camera that he had given me a few months before had one picture left, and I had been waiting for the winter sky that surrounded us.

An old man passing by took a picture of us smiling with the sun sinking into the river behind us. That day, David was wearing a black coat and a green, plaid scarf, and I was wearing a big green jacket and white earmuffs, but none of this is visible in the picture. Instead, the picture shows a silhouette.

“Isn’t it weird how trees die and are born again, year after year?” he observed, looking at the naked branches that surrounded us, “even the river dies, it stops flowing and becomes static.”

“The trees don’t die. They just shed their leaves to stay alive. In the spring, they sprout new ones. It’s the way of life.”

“What if they still love their old leaves?”

“That’s just not how it works. They have to let them go.” David pulled his hand out of mine and I suddenly became aware of the harsh wind.



**

By the middle of December, David wouldn’t text me for a week at a time. I had gotten used to staring at my phone, waiting for a nonexistent trace of him. That’s what I was doing the night before Mark’s party—one we had agreed to go to together at the beginning of the month.

         “Hannah, stop staring at your phone,” Tony said. We were sitting on my couch, watching an old episode of Seinfeld.

         “I just have this feeling that he’s going to ditch me,” I said, turning to Tony.

         “He’s an idiot,” he said.

         “Why?”

         “Ask him.”

         “Ask him what?”

         My phone buzzed:  Hey, I’m not going to be able to meet you for dinner. Lizzie is having a bad day so I’m walking her to the party instead. See you there!

I didn’t respond. My throat burned. I snatched up my purse and slammed out of the house without saying goodbye to Tony.          

Two hours later, he had cornered me. “I need to be single right now,” he said, glancing at Lizzie quickly and then at his red converse shoes.

         “Look at me,” I said. David looked up at me with eyes that I couldn’t recognize. 

         “I don’t know what’s going on, Hannah,” he said, putting his hands inside of his pockets.

         “What?”

         “It’s like, I feel love for you inside, but I don’t want to kiss you.” He grabbed my hands and held them firmly when they started to shake. 

         “Why?”  I let go of his hands and picked at my cuticles. My voice sounded like someone else’s—weak and desperate.

         “I still love her,” he finally responded after a long pause, nodding towards Lizzie.



**

         I feel David like the itch of a phantom limb. I can’t tend to it because he is gone. There is nothing left to scratch, but an itch remains. A month has passed, and I am sideways in my bed, with my knees tucked into my chest, flipping through the last six months of my life. The pictures are all I have left. I got rid of everything else—of his green sweater, his toothbrush and deodorant. I wash my sheets so they won’t smell like him; I get rid of the presents too. I drop off boxes full of books at the Good Will store and throw away all the letters.

But not the pictures, I like pictures way too much. Especially the kind you don’t get to see right away.