I’m here, I’m here—I’m not leaving.
“What were their names?”
“Aisha and Jack,” she provides, biting a raw scrap of skin at her cuticle. She feels the buzz of her walls, rising again. Like the electric hum of a fence, warning her of dangerous areas ahead, terrain too rough and sensitive to traverse. She’s taken a tentative, exploratory step forward—time to go back.
She smiles at her friend, shaky but not ingenuine. “Come on,” she says, grasping Jackie’s hand. “Let’s go, we’re going to be late.”
Later, using the printer in Aleksandr’s study, she prints a copy of the photo. She tapes it to her mirror at home, among the loved Polaroids of her friends; she doesn’t want the original to fade any further from age or sunshine. In her own bed in Williamsburg, while Jackie is out with Simon, she tugs out the stowed-away shoebox from her closet, and spends a quiet hour slowly leafing through the pictures from her childhood, reorganizing the new ones into their chronology, guided by the orange digits of the date imprint. She lingers on some, breath sharp, feeling both so close and so far away to something. Flashes of happiness, these memories with her parents have felt too painful to look at. The sight of herself as a small child, her big grin, their hands in hers, makes her want to cry.
Inside the rest of Jane’s box, she found her mother’s diplomas, her birth certificate, a few small childhood art projects—and a little teddy bear, handmade, that she remembers with a jolt: Her social worker had sewn it for her while she was in the group home, using some of her father’s old shirts—it had smelled so deeply like him—
Lili freezes, before immediately packing everything up again, shoving it back into her closet along with her shoebox of photographs. She’s not ready for that.
But overall, she tries to feel this old loss, and not collapse underneath it.
When she sleeps over at the loft, she leaves the door to Aleksandr’s closet open, comforted by the silhouettes of his clothing. That painting—Rublev, golden—gleams in the corner.
Amina(10:07 p.m.) party pics are here!
James(10:07 p.m.) fucking finally. what were you doing? hand-developing these?
Amina(10:08 p.m.) im a busy woman with many demands on my time
James(10:08 p.m.) yes and i have an ig feed to curate
Amina(10:08 p.m.) men shouldn’t have social media
Jackie(10:08 p.m.) ami, these look so good!!!!
Amina(10:09 p.m.) thx! if anyone wants copies, lemme know
Jackie(10:09 p.m.) me!!!!!! can i have the one of me and lili by the plants?
Amina(10:10 p.m.) you got it
Seeing her phone light up on the counter, Lili opens the group chat as she brushes her teeth.
After dinner out with her friends—cold martinis, Greek food—Lili had walked back to the loft, relishing the dark night air. Her teacup of half-drunk yerba maté still sat on the kitchen counter from when she’d stopped by that afternoon with bags of fresh groceries, imperfect produce from the farm that she gets for free. Knowing he was coming back tomorrow, she’d thought she could cook something, then.
Now, spitting out her toothpaste with the sound of the bath draining behind her, Lili idly flips through the photos: James making drinks in the packed kitchen; Jackie and Lili hugging against the plant wall, vivid red hair and gleaming black hair vibrant against the lucid green; a shot in the hall mirror of Lili inspecting her eyeliner, Amina half hidden by her camera flash—
Lili’s thumb stops flicking through the album.
The two of them. Aleksandr had pulled her into his lap when he was sitting on the couch. Lili’s arm is slung around his shoulders, his hands on her waist, and the conversation is going on around them: Amina and James sitting beside them, gesticulating adamantly to Elijah out of frame, dark party caught in the Polaroid camera flash, but Lili’s looking at Aleksandr,a mischievous gleam in her eyes as she says something only to him, words between them, and there’s a smile on his lips, as he watches her, listens to her, and it’s like it’s just the two of them, there, some conversation, some secret language amid the others—
And she hadn’t—she hadn’t—
She hadn’t realized how they look at each other.
Lili hesitates, before tapping share. She sends the photo off, then clicks her phone closed. Anxious uncertainty twists inside her.
Heading out of the bathroom, she goes into his closet. Despite her clean teeth, she rummages for the pack of cigarettes. She smirks a little, spying a second cigarette missing, past the one they shared a few weeks ago.
In the living room, she hops onto the window ledge, and lights a cigarette. Drawing her knees into her chest, she takes a long inhale. She tries to find calm in the drift of smoke, the rasp at the back of her throat. Tapping ash out the open window, she listens to fragments of distant conversations in the street below: pedestrians passing, work dinners at the restaurant on the corner, a gallery opening party.
Her phone buzzes next to her.
Aleksandr Petrov.
