portrait of a young girl

We've been reading a story, a long story. Over a period of days. Because we can only read under certain conditions. Outside. At night. Under a porch light. Or with a flash light. Or by the light of a single candle, which is how we finished reading tonight.

Is it possible, do you think, that someone on the other side of the world, someone you've never met, can look at your face in a photograph and know whole parts of you? By separating pieces of your very visage into something resembling a Picaso, (eyes here, nose there, smile all willy-nilly) they create a composition. They study the wrinkles around your eyes, or how you like pink polish on your fingernails, or the way your hair falls across your face and fill in the blanks to make up the story of your life. Then, there you are on a piece of paper. A written version of a person you should know everything about.

* * *

Even if she wrote it out from beginning to end, it still wouldn't make sense. There would be giant gaping holes in the plot, like craters on the moon. Miles wide. She thought she'd been careful about it. Collecting moments one by one and adding them in like ingredients to a favorite recipe.

Sometimes she went days without adding anything to the story. The picture didn't seem to speak to her. She felt uninspired. Lost. Other times she wrote pages and pages. Words came flowing out like endless rain, like the song by the Beatles. Some days all she could manage were lists of words. Like, "forté" or "dream catcher." Or a phrase. Like, "In celebration of our country."

The girl played Salut d'Amour on her violin at night when no one could hear. She liked pink nail polish the very best, the kind that came as close to red on the color wheel as possible. But not red. She was partial to orange poppies but ate all the red Starbursts first. She favored crushed ice instead of cubed because it was easier to chew once the water was gone. In the summer, she sipped lemonade and dreamed of sailing the seven seas. She was afraid of odd numbers when doing math, but preferred them to even when making an arrangement of some sort. She ate handfuls of Swedish fish and chocolate covered peanuts at the movies because she loved the combination of salty-sweet. If she could live in an art museum, she would, and secretly she wished she could golf.

But none of that was in the story. Because those things can't be discovered in a photograph. They were left out, along with so many other details that didn't seem important. So the story was unfinished. Incomplete. It sounded like someone was playing a violin solo without an A string, (although she heard that Itzhak Perlman did that very thing in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center once. And she loved Lincoln Center.) It was a song without a chorus, and everyone knows the chorus is the very best part, or why would they sing it so many times?

Like a picture without a caption, or a face without a name, the story sat open-ended, a choose-your-own adventure with nothing to choose from. She hoped someone would pick up where she had left off. That someone would look at her smile or the way she squared her shoulders in the photograph and pick up the pieces. That they would put pen to paper and finish what she could not. Because you really can't tell everything about a person from a single snapshot or even a photo album, especially if you've never met them and especially if they live halfway around the world. It's what happens between the frames of film that makes up the portrait of a life, not the portrait itself. And one day, when all the details have been scribbled down, someone, somewhere is going to read the story aloud, perhaps at night under a porch light, and the listeners will hang on every word.