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I Have Not Changed My Profile Picture in Four Years
What a small square image built into a wall—on protecting yourself until you forget whether you’re still inside.
I wasn’t waiting for anyone to come back. I was waiting to stop feeling like someone might.”
The garden in my profile picture has a stone path, a wooden bench, and three hydrangeas that lean slightly to the left. I didn’t take the photo. It’s a stock image I found when I was leaving my ex, or when he was leaving me, or when we were doing the thing couples do where both people pretend to be the one ending it while the other person picks up the check. I uploaded it in a wine bar downtown, sometime around my thirty-first birthday. He’d just told me I was “too much,” though not in those exact words. He was better at making things sound like weather. He said I made him feel like he was standing at the bottom of a well. I nodded. I thought the hydrangeas photographed well in low light.
Four years later, the photo is still up. My friend Sarah mentioned it once. You know you could just change it? I shrugged. I didn’t change it. And somewhere in that not-changing, the picture stopped being a picture. It became the room I live in.
