the space around her

by Linda Briskin

The photograph arrived by email—out of the blue. It was an ordinary picture but taken more than fifty years ago, a snap from the days when images were developed at the corner drugstore. I wondered why David, a distant friend from high school, sent it. We hadn’t been in touch for decades.

The seated young woman is not smiling. She looks tired. Her mouth is tight. She sits apart, an outsider, guarded. The space around her is familiar. She’s looking away, at someone perhaps, or possibly just observing. A hand is extended, not to her. She doesn’t reach out.

Whispers—aloof, unfriendly—followed her down the school hallway.

Maybe it’s the ruffled blouse with flowers that makes her unrecognizable. I only remember her wearing black. Or maybe not.

Something is nestled in her hands. Maybe to tie back her hair which will eventually reach her waist. She’ll make a long braid and pin it around her head like a halo. An ethereal renaissance look. Secretive. She’s not interested in style but rather in making herself anew.

She bought the watch for herself. She liked the sturdy but plain leather strap, and the tiny watch face. Almost a secret in itself. For reasons long forgotten, its purchase made her parents angry. It likely revealed her life apart and also the babysitting money she kept hidden from them. They were always angry at her. Obstinate, they would say, insubordinate, stubborn, bad.

Where is this party? A treed backyard with a swing set and seesaw. A picket fence. Likely a blue sky. Not her home. Her family always lived in cramped apartments saturated with loud voices and angry noise. Her own interior silence helped to protect her.

In later years, living in a house with a backyard would offer unexpected pleasures. The secrecy of the garden with winged angels, small stone rabbits, twittering yellow finch and red cardinals, all hidden in the tangle of shrubs and flowers. Protected. A place to breathe. A space she controls.

***

That seated girl is me. I am sixteen years old. I didn’t recognize myself at first.

The picture was likely taken at a high school graduation party. George is reading the newly printed annual for Monklands High School in Montréal, class of ’66, its cover vaguely familiar. Next to me, Sally is smiling a comfortable friendly smile, but not at me. In that photo, I’m not wearing my glasses and may be taking comfort in the blur. I recognized George and Sally right away, but not myself.

As I study the photo, the past and present slip into each other as if the past has an agenda of its own, elusive but insistent. The photo forced me from the safety of a kind of amnesia to anamnesis, prompting me to remember things that happened in the past.

Not long after that picture was taken, I left home and tried to slice my childhood out of my consciousness with a fine scalpel. I committed to a life without a past. I’ve had a continuing antagonism to memories, imagine them buried deep and inaccessible. I was fooling myself, of course.

The photograph continues to haunt me. Maybe I don’t want to be that girl with the troubled look, wearing a flowered shirt I can’t remember and hate the sight of. At sixteen, she already looks weary of life. I don’t want her to be my history, my past. Is this the only story I can tell about her? I am her, not her, sometimes her.

She seems brittle and unyielding, but I’m inclined to push back that strand of hair on her forehead and comfort her.

Linda Briskin is a writer and fine art photographer. Her creative nonfiction bends genres, makes quirky connections and highlights social justice themes—quietly. Her CNF has recently been published in Barren, *82Review, Masque & Spectacle and Canary. In her fiction, she is drawn to writing about whimsy, fleeting moments, and the small secrets of interior lives. In 2021 and 2022, flash pieces were published in Tipping the Scales and Cobalt Review. As a photographer, she is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. Recently, her photographs have been published in The Hopper, Flare Journal, Alluvian, Canadian Camera, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Burningword Literary Journal and High Shelf Press. In 2021 and 2022, her photographs were chosen for the Herstory exhibit sponsored by Manhattan Arts International. https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/