framed raze i remember this house. i remember being here. i remember playing charades. but i don't know who this person is. there's a thick smudge in the place where her name should be. all i know is what i can see. she's someone's daughter. someone's sister. maybe ten years old. the same age i was then. she's wearing a pink t-shirt with a flamingo on the front — a wading bird wearing a black fedora with a white band, working as a lifeguard for the summer, smirking from its tower. her brown hair curls up where it meets her shoulders. it hasn't been brushed all day. she's holding a paper plate. there's a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. or maybe a mound of mashed potatoes. i can't tell. the image isn't sharp enough. her ears have never felt the sting of a piercing needle. most of her face above the bridge of her nose is missing. i can only see enough of her right eye to prove it's the same colour as her hair. behind her there are pantry doors painted white. grey drapes cover a kitchen window. thin stripes run parallel to the counter. blue, orange, and black. beneath those, thicker stripes. the first three fingers of someone's hand are a blur on the left. there's the suggestion of a thumb and a truncated pinkie. i don't know who the hand belongs to. i know it isn't mine. it took me a long time to figure out how framing worked. i used to have a bad habit of cutting people's heads off in all the pictures i took. at least this girl survived with some of her face intact. whoever she was then. whoever she is now. with my spectra 2, i had an excuse for fucking everything up. if i wanted to take a picture of myself, i had to hold the camera as far away as i could get it. there was no rotating screen to show me what the camera saw when i couldn't press the viewfinder against my eye. i had to guess and hope for the best. sometimes i got lucky. sometimes i got nothing. it seems right that the only picture anyone took of the two of us together is one i shot with that polaroid camera, and it's a disaster. i stood beside you. i turned the lens so it was looking at us. i took my shot. i guessed wrong. i watched white nothing turn into you and me, but we weren't really us at all. i knew i wouldn't have another chance to get it right. everything beneath your upper lip is a lie. all you are is red hair and green eyes. shea butter and silicone. a face without a mouth. my cheek is touching your forehead. i'm smiling, or trying to smile. you're not. the hinge of an open white door, made crooked by my wrist, is half-hidden behind my head. that's it. that's all there is. that was our last good night together. your sister decided to dump the guy she was going out with. i met him. i liked him. he liked me too. he told me i was crazy, but he said it with a smile. he didn't do anything wrong. she just got bored after hanging out with him for a few weeks. she ghosted him and hoped he'd disappear. he came to the house and spent half an hour pounding on the front door. he didn't scream. he didn't say anything. he stood there and knocked. the skin on his face was pulled so tight against his skull it looked like a rubber mask. you did what you always did when you got tense. you smoked. he left after a while. so did your sister. she had a date with some new guy. we ordered chinese food. we both got the same thing. combo number five from jade. sweet and sour pork, chicken chop suey, chicken fried rice, and wonton soup. my stomach wanted more food than my mouth was willing to let it have. i could never eat anything around you. you talked about your ex and cried. you said he never visited you when you were in the hospital. i wanted to hold your hand. but i didn't. we watched that movie where the rock gets out of prison and drives around in a chevelle and starts killing anyone who had anything to do with his brother's death. i thought the most interesting character in the whole thing was the guy everyone else thought was an ass. he never got a name. he was just "killer". he did ashtanga yoga to "i wanna be your dog" and glared at a picture of a child with leg braces. he was looking at himself. the camera showed a jagged scar above one knee and filled in twenty years of backstory with a five-second tracking shot. what made him interesting was his girlfriend. she knew he killed people for money. she didn't care. she loved him. she worried about him. she wanted him to be safe. she kicked the movie's legs out from beneath its bloated body and gave it a bit of humanity the script didn't know what to do with. i wanted to know what it would be like to have someone who loved me like that. i didn't get to see how the movie ended. you got bored halfway through and put on the first episode of "fruits basket" instead. you said it was your favourite anime series. it was about an orphan who became friends with people who were possessed by the spirits of the chinese zodiac. they reverted to their animal forms when they were hurt or upset. you leaned into me. i held the softest part of you in my hands. when the ash at the end of your cigarette was ready to fall, i moved the coffee mug you favoured beneath your chin so you could knock another grey caterpillar into the ceramic bowl. you said you appreciated the way i always fixed things whenever you had a problem with something. like my life was one long mistake. you smiled at me when we washed the dishes together. you said you were going to fall in love with me. you didn't touch me in bed. a smoke alarm with a dying battery kept me awake most of the night. i stared at your sleeping face on your leopard print pillowcase and thought about you asking me to write you something pretty to read before i left one morning. you gave me a notebook and a pen. i wrote about how happy i was to be with you. how you made me feel like i was floating all the time. when i asked you later if you read my note, all you said was, "you have horrible handwriting." i thought about the time i couldn't get it up because i was scared shitless and running on no sleep, and you told me i should get testosterone injections. i thought about the time you called me and said, "i really need you right now," and when i showed up your ex had his hand on your leg. i thought about the time you told me you showed him a picture of me and he laughed and told you i was ugly. when i was able to fall asleep, i had a dream about a married couple who traded their adult son for a younger version of himself. they picked up their new son from the institution that made him. they drove him home. he sat in a child's car seat in the back of their van. his mind was a void. he was going to grow up to be the same person they abandoned. they would keep throwing him away and repeating the same cycle until they were dead and he didn't know who he was anymore. their house had four front doors. each one led to an apartment. the last apartment on the right was where their son would live. they would keep him there so they wouldn't have to think about him. in the morning i watched you chain smoke and drink something brown and lukewarm that was more sugar than coffee. you played farmville and moved pigs around and ignored me for four hours. then i went home and waited for you to call and tell me i didn't spend enough time with you. three days later we were finished. and i still didn't know how that stupid movie ended. it's funny how much you can see in a picture that has almost nothing to show you. 220421 ... tender_square [a day after he tells me he may never be able to write a narrative the length of "trailer" again, he crafts this avalanche of heartache that stares unflinchingly into the past. the photos described here may have been shot askew, but everything about this blathe is framed perfectly.] 220421 ... kerry [i second tender_square. somehow i missed "trailer" until tonight... so i feel lucky to read all of this, both of these blathes, in one sitting.] 220422 ... raze i swear, between the stunning things you've been writing and saying things like this, the two of you are going to blow my heart to smithereens. (but i'm okay with that.) 220423 what's it to you? who go blather from