THEIRAFTER

We wrote each other letters on paper. I put things in mine I don’t say out loud, which felt fine at the time, because it’s paper and paper is for one person.

Then we had to turn each other’s letters into pictures. Not new pictures, the ones already sitting in our phones. So I’m scrolling my own camera roll looking for something that happened to her, and everything in there is mine, and I’m supposed to find her somewhere in it.

Hers hang on one side, mine on the other, facing each other. You look at her memory through mine.

The one she made of me isn’t me. It’s a description. I’d have to be told it was mine. And I don’t mean that badly, it was fun seeing how someone else reads your experience, it just didn’t move me.

I couldn’t do hers. I only understood that afterwards. She says I got very close at some moments, and I don’t think so, and I don’t know whether that’s me being honest or me being hard on myself.

I don’t regret any of it. It’s what I’ve been through.

It was the first work in the show, so everyone had to walk through it to get anywhere. It looks like those bead curtains people hang in doorways at home. They move when someone goes past.