You never asked anything of me, and I think that is why I gave you more than I intended. Had you looked at me directly, it might have ended there. A returned attention concludes things. It fixes them into proportion, allows you to step back and say, “Something happened and is now complete.” But you did not. You remained just beyond that point, and so I continued, inside something that never stated itself and therefore never needed to end.

I did not so much begin as allow it. I stood where I could see you without admitting I had chosen to. I arrived earlier than necessary, stayed longer than I could justify. You were there, more often than not, seated in the same light, with a placidity that felt deliberate. A book rested open in your hands, though you turned the page so rarely it seemed less like reading and more like being seen reading.

At first, I called it admiration. It is the safest word we have. We notice a face, a posture, a way of holding oneself, and we think it aesthetic. I stayed with what could be accounted for: the line of your wrist, the slight shift of your shoulder, the hollow at your throat where the fabric loosened. I kept these things small. I was very careful about that.

But the body does not wait for permission. I would become aware of my own mouth, the dryness of it. A heat that moved up through my sternum and arrived, embarrassingly, in my face. I would stand too long looking at your hands and then not know, when I finally looked away, what I had been doing with my own. Once I knocked something over and did not stop to pick it up. In the stairwell I pressed my back against the wall and tried to breathe like someone who had not just been undone by the sight of a person reading.

That was when I understood it was not admiration.

You never looked at me. Or if you did, it was so slight I could not trust it. Once, I was certain that your eyes met mine and something in me lurched, a dropping sensation in the stomach, a loosening at the knees I had to lock to keep still. I looked away, then back. You had already gone back to the page. For the rest of the afternoon my hands shook faintly. I was furious with myself and I could not stop.

That evening I tried to recall your face and found I could not hold it whole. You came back in pieces I had not chosen. The particular weight of your lower lip. The shape your collarbones made. I lay in the dark and I was ashamed of myself and I looked anyway, in whatever way one looks at something that exists only inside them.

I began to paint you because I thought it would help. If I could place you somewhere outside myself, fix you on a surface, then maybe the looking would have somewhere to go. Maybe I could step back from a canvas and say, “There!” That is what it was. Finished.

It did not help. Every version was wrong in a different way. In one, the mouth too delicate. In another, the eyes looking just past me, which was accurate and unbearable. I kept returning to the painting at hours I could not even explain myself, standing in front of it in my coat, having come home late and gone there directly before doing anything else. I did not ask myself why. I was afraid of the answer.

Then one night I turned the face. Just slightly, toward me.

I stood back and something happened in my chest I can only describe as recognition. Not of you. But of wanting. A wanting I had been carrying so long I had stopped feeling its weight, and now, seeing it outside myself, given a face, given eyes that finally looked back, I felt it all at once. My throat closed. I sat down on the floor. My legs just froze.

After that I could not look at other women without something snagging in me. A particular kind of hands. A voice with something low in it. I understood that you had not started this. You had only been the place where I finally noticed what was already happening. The wanting was not new. Only my awareness of it was.

When I looked at the painting again, I meant to finish it. To resolve it so I could leave. I stood in front of it and looked for a long time.

And then I saw it.

The mouth was mine. Not like mine. Mine. The particular way I hold my lips when I am trying not to show something. The tension at the jaw I recognise from mirrors. The eyes I had painted looking back at me were the only eyes I knew well enough to make look real. My own. The hollow at the throat I had observed so many times, that I had carried home with me, that I believed was yours.

I had been painting myself.

The whole time. The longing I had placed in your face was mine. I had put it in my own face and called it yours.

I sat on the cold floor and felt maybe grief, maybe relief, or the particular shame of someone who has hidden something so successfully that they managed to hide it from themselves. All that wanting. All those years of careful looking away. And underneath it, this: a self that desired, that had always desired, that was not frightened of what it desired but only of the knowing.

You never looked at me. Of course you did not. You were never there.

All those years I thought I was searching for someone. Instead, I was standing in front of a mirror with my eyes closed, working up the nerve to open them.

Cover image: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), dir. Céline Sciamma. Courtesy Lilies Films / Arte France Cinéma.