Frank told me she was sorry for getting my name wrong, and she was just kidding, honestly, and put your fucking dress back on, come on. So, I took off my bra. I remember her sighing, her finger hovering on the shutter release. I remember her pinching the bridge of her nose and looking down at her shoes, and telling me to put my dress back on again. I told her to take a picture, because it would last longer. The next photograph’s framing is off, because she took it without looking at me. But she took it. There I am, smirking, tits out, left arm cut off, pushing my hair off my face. I run my nail along the line of my round breasts, my concave stomach, my hipbones.
And that’s the last one. She murmured something about students, and straight girls. Then I don’t do this, but… I smiled, always happy to be the exception to a rule.
I peel the previous photo out of the book, the one I put on Instagram. Not one of mine, but maybe it’ll be good for the book. They’ll have to drop Frank a line – I’d get a kick out of that.
I grab a glass, some ice and a generous splash of vodka, before I open the next book. Intimate photos, a mix of mine and ones Frank took, mostly Polaroids and disposables. Lo-fi, pretentious. Frank grimacing in red lipstick I drew on her with her pinned down and struggling; me wearing one of her jackets and nothing else; Frank wrapped up in my Ikea bedsheets; me sitting on her kitchen bench in pyjamas, eating cereal from the box. I look very young in all of these.
She only sat for me properly once and told me she’d probably never work at the uni again if I showed them. I took the photos in her studio, with her camera and her lights. I made her wear this shirt, the same shade of blue as a Tiffany box, Open Me blue. Her body was flat, shapeless and bony. Her breasts were too small to grab （in what she’d call my big snatchy spider hands） so I’d always end up scratching her chest, looking for something to hold. She has one of my scratches in these photos – you can just make it out, on her sternum once I’d gotten her to pop a few buttons.
They’re not much like any other photos I’ve taken. I guess because I did have a thing with Frank. An okay thing, too. You compare these to the What would you do to be my boyfriend? photos, the pictures of boys in nightgowns, the stuff I do now – it’s like a different person took them. These photos feel warm. She’s smiling in them, having fun. There’s no weird power dynamic, just… Frank. Her grinning with her hand on her stomach; her slipping her shirt off her shoulder, unbuckling her belt, laughing. There’s one where half her head is cut off because she’s coming towards me, because I whined about the white balance being off, come fix it for me, but I just wanted to kiss her. Her lips were always chapped.
She ruined it, in the end. Six months we’d been fucking around, and then my mam visited and Frank wanted to meet her. I laughed in her face. Then she takes me to the PV for her LGBT northerners in London project, and I’m angry she put my photo in it without asking me （she just assumed I’d be fine with it） so we have this huge champagne-fuelled argument outside the gallery. She told me to get over myself and come out （be bi, be a lesbian, be Frank-sexual, be something other than a fucking closet case!） so I told her to fuck off. I shoved her against a wall and stomped off by myself.
The last straw was this dinner party she made me go to, where she introduced me as her girlfriend, and her friend asked her which cradle she stole me from. I was horrible all evening, and we screamed at each other in the taxi.
‘Since when am I your girlfriend?’ I snarled. And she asked me if I was fucking joking. I ended up on the receiving end of this monologue – ‘I spent ten miserable fucking years in the closet; wearing lipstick, and having these insecure, transient relationships, where we never said I love you, and we never did normal shit, and it was all behind closed doors… And you know what? No, Irina. I’m not fucking doing it. I’m not going back. Not for you, and not for anyone.’
And I was just like… Whatever. And she went off on one at me about my nasty streak. I’m rough, and I’m judgemental, and I’m self-involved and cruel. And I ask her if I’m so awful, why’s she still fucking me, then?
She didn’t say anything. She got the cab to drop me off at mine, booted me out, and I never spoke to her again. She came to my final show at BA, and I blanked her. I haven’t seen her since.
Stuck into the back of the book of those Frank photos, there’s one of Flo. When Frank and I split, Flo cut all her hair off. Then it was all blue jeans, white shirts, cigarettes, sports bras that kept her chest flat. It was creepy. In the photograph, she’s even standing with her thumbs hooked through the belt loops of her jeans, like Frank used to, fag dangling out the corner of her mouth.
I let her do it. I mean, when she came home the first day with short hair （a week after I stopped seeing Frank） I was like, are you fucking joking, Flo, and she was just like what?
Flo was my hair of the dog – a shot to get you over the worst of the hangover. And when Flo just fucking stood there, looking cute and butch, with her fucking mouth shut, it was absolutely fine. It was a warm bed.
It got weird. It was already weird, but I think the amount of cocaine we were doing, and the drinking, exacerbated the weirdness of the situation.
Flo kept over-sharing the way people do when they’re fucked up. And I’d shout at her, for making it weird, and she’d cry and start telling me she thought we could work, and I’d shout at her more. Then we’d wake up the next day, and act like it never happened. Rinse repeat, for a whole summer.
I go to text Flo: do you remember when we used to get coked up and have bad sex where neither of us finished and we’d argue because you wanted to be my girlfriend and you’d cry and i’d scream at you and stuff. Lol.
But I don’t send it. I don’t think I do. I delete our message history, because if I don’t remember doing it, and I destroy the evidence, it never happened. I laugh to myself. The sound echoes around the garage.
I pull out a couple of the Frank photos, the one of her in the lipstick, and a couple of the blue shirt ones. I pick my phone up again and type her name into Facebook. I see someone who could be her, and then I wipe the search, and close the app, and pour another vodka.
The next box is what I call The Forbidden Selfies. It’s scrawled on the side. I laugh again.
This is my only set of self-portraits; I went off having my photo taken properly after this. The photos I take of other people – men I never have to see again – they are perfect little imprints, like those photos of my boy. They go away, and I have the photo, and that’s all that matters.
I don’t go away after I’ve had my photo taken. I have to look at myself every day, so a collection of selfies, for me, is less of an exercise in narcissism, more a record of my own gradual decay.
I check my phone before I open the box. My Instagram is going off. Over a thousand likes, a bunch of new followers and a lot of comments.
Lol do you still look like this now tho??? I delete that one.
We stan a queen who misplaces her underwear. I recognise the username, a young girl who comments on all my photos and covered me in her A-level art class.
post smth more recent – also deleted, along with, do u have kik. I don’t even know what ‘kik’ is.