The Girl in the Photograph

The photograph has no date on the back. No name. No record number.

I turn it over again.

The protocol for falsified evidence is clear. I have been trained to identify destabilization tactics. The resistance uses manufactured intimacy as a weapon — false history, constructed memory, the suggestion of a life unlived. I know this. I was briefed on this. I set the photograph on the desk and look at the wall instead.

I look at the photograph again.

The girl has my nose. The angle of my jaw. The particular way I sit, cross-legged, spine straight even in a field, even as a child, even in what appears to be joy. I have been trained to identify subjects by the unchanging architecture of a face. I am trained to be certain. I am certain.

She has hair the color of wheat.

It reaches her shoulders. It is moving slightly, caught in whatever wind existed on whatever afternoon this was taken, on a grassy hill outside a building I now know the name of. She is laughing. Her arms are partially outstretched, reaching toward something just outside the frame, and her face is open in a way that I do not have a word for. I have a word for everything. I have been trained for precision of thought and economy of language and the elimination of anything that does not serve a function.

I do not have a word for her face.

The boy beside her is older. He is laughing too, half covering it with his hand like he cannot help it, like it surprised him. He has red hair and a scar already forming on his chin and he will grow up to speak in riddles and call her a flower and look at her like she is the only thing worth looking at in every room he enters. He does not know that yet. Neither does she. They are just two children on a hill in the late afternoon light and something is very funny and the woman standing behind them — straw-haired, white-coated, her hand resting on the girl's shoulder — is not laughing. She is watching. Her face is the only still thing in the photograph.

I run my hand across my head. The skin is smooth.

I look at the girl's hair.

I look at the woman with her hand on my shoulder and I think about the fact that someone made a decision — a careful, considered, well-intentioned decision — about what I was allowed to keep. What was excess. What was getting in the way. I was four years old and someone looked at me and determined that the girl reaching for things just outside the frame was a problem to be solved.

I was administered my first treatment as standard protocol for early placement candidates. I have no memory before the academy. I was told this was normal — that early memory is unreliable, fragmentary, not to be trusted anyways. I was told that the treatment had no effect on cognition, on identity, on the fundamental architecture of the self. Only on excess. Only on what was not useful. Only on what got in the way.

I wonder if she cried. The girl in the photograph. I wonder if she reached for something and it wasn't there and she cried, and whether that was the moment someone decided the reaching itself was the problem.

I have not cried. I don't know if I am capable of it. I have felt things this week that I do not have adequate language for — heat, pressure, a pulling in my chest like something trying to remember the direction it was supposed to travel. I have stood in a field barefoot and felt the grass and thought acceptable because it was the only word available to me and it was not the right word, it was nowhere near the right word, but it was the only container I had.

She would have had a better word. The girl in the photograph. She looks like someone who was accumulating words for things before anyone thought to take them away.

I set the photograph down on the desk. I pick up the pages beside it instead.

His handwriting is full of big loops, tilting forward and upward on the page as if the words are trying to outrun themselves. Pages and pages of it, dated back over years. I read them not as intelligence — not the way I was trained to read intercepted material, looking for coordinates, for patterns, for actionable data — but just as words. As what they are.

He has been writing about her for years. About me. About a girl he knew once on a hill at sunset and never forgot and has been looking for ever since, in the way that rivers apparently look for things, which is continuously and without the ability to stop. He does not describe her the way I would describe myself in any report I have ever filed. He does not describe her in terms of function or compliance or utility. He describes the way she sat. The sound he imagines she would make if she laughed. The color of her hair in the late light, which he has named seventeen different ways across seventeen different pages and none of them are the same and all of them are accurate and I know they are accurate because I am looking at the photograph and the photograph shows me exactly what he means.

He has never met me. That is the thing I keep returning to.

The girl he has been writing about for years — the one he calls flower, the one the water is always seeking, the one whose hair he describes as wheat and honey and the last light before dark — she existed before I did. Or rather: she was here first, and then something was administered, and I arrived in her place, and he has spent years writing letters to someone who was not there to receive them.

And I have spent years — my whole life, my only life — not knowing I was supposed to be somewhere else.

My hand goes to my head.

I was told the treatment was for clarity. For focus. For the elimination of excess. I was told the taste of saline was normal and that my shoulders would relax and the noise would stop and I would be better equipped to function. I was told this was a gift. I took it every morning for as long as I can remember, which is not as long as it should be, and I called it my allergy medicine and I was grateful for it.

I look at the photograph. At the girl with her arms out, reaching for something I cannot see, her face full of a word I still don't have. At the boy laughing beside her. At the woman behind them who is not laughing, whose hand rests on the girl's shoulder with a weight that looks, now that I study it, less like affection and more like an anchor. Like she is trying to hold something in place that is already pulling away.

It didn't work, I think. Whatever she was trying to hold.

Here I am.

I do not know who I am. That is a new thought, this week. I have always known exactly what I am — my rank, my function, my designation, my protocol number, my compliance record, my role in a system I was told was correct and necessary and acceptable. I have always known what I can do. I have never once been asked what I want.

The girl in the photograph was reaching for something.

I don't know what it was. I have no memory of the wanting. But the arms are mine and the reaching is mine and somewhere inside whatever I have become there is still a girl who had wheat-colored hair and sat in a field at sunset and found something funny enough to laugh at without covering her mouth.

I want to know what it was.

For the first time I can remember — which is not very long at all, it turns out — I put down the protocol. I don't file it. I don't move forward.

I just sit with the photograph of the girl I used to be, and I let myself not know what comes next.

And I do not call that a failure.