ouch
i never understand or get or even have the faintest idea what the pictures i make mean to those around me, i am always so far off the map. i know what they mean to me, so i assume they actually mean the same thing to those i give them to or made them of.
not true.
i met her online almost two years ago, now we’ve been apart awhile and we both seem to be lost and lonely again looking for new love in the same old place. i made the mistake of looking at her profile and found pictures of her i made and celebrated, used for her to meet someone that is not me.
ouch.
she hated having her picture taken, to the point it would make her cry if i even pointed my camera at her, so i felt lucky to have this one, it was the only picture of her she ever let me put up on my wall. now she put it up on the internets wall for everyone to see how i saw her because she no longer wanted me looking at her.
ouch.
i spent a ton of money getting a different picture printed and framed to give her once. it was the most special thing i knew how to make or do for her at the time. i left it in her apartment to surprise her. i never heard a word about it again other then she had never seen a picture framed that way before and she didn’t know when the picture was from (a project about her i had even put online). i am not sure where she put it, i don’t think it ever got fully unwrapped and is sitting in the back of a closet somewhere with the other storage with her air conditioner. later, when i got mad and hurt as we parted, i asked for it back. i had never really done anything like that before that i can remember, but for some reason, other then just being mad and bitter, i wanted it back. i usually give things away for how it makes me feel and forget i ever did it at all, never caring to a certain extent what the recipient actually did or thought of it, but to see this one gift, for her, being about what it was about, get pretty much no reaction of any kind at all, from her in that moment i gave it or when i asked for it back, was just too much this time, i’d rather burn it then have it unloved or unnoticed in her closet for the next guy to find or for her to stumble across and throw away someday when she moves. i am not so happy with myself for asking for it back, it’s all the things you’d imagine it is, x2, but it made sense at the time.
ouch.