It occurs to me as W. places a rusty coffee can on the fence post, that our future is receding into the distance. It is a smear, a blind curve. The road ahead is obscured from view. I want to know what lies outside the fence, the frame. But, W., the first man I think I love, is a guess, a grasping. An echo, but not quite the song itself. He comes into my life with the brief thought that he and I could go the distance, last forever. But we won’t. Somewhere between us is a falling short, a dimness, a twilight, an ending. It remains, haunting us, until we part ways.

The can perches on the fence post in front of me, my back to the setting sun. Despite my resistance, W. won’t let us leave until I bring the heavy shotgun to my shoulder and pull the trigger. I’ve never fired a gun before — I’ve never wanted to. When I think about it later, I study my shape there, aiming east toward the darkness beyond the can. Nothing about my form in this moment makes sense. It’s as if I am examining a portrait of my own absence. The only thing grounding me is the solidness of the gun inside the curve of my shoulder.

I fire, and the shot sends a flock of starlings into the violet sky. A flinching mass of silky black silhouette, smoke and feathers, lifts off as the gun kicks back. I lower the weapon, place it gently on the ground. I don’t recall any deer in the field, but I think about them. They scatter in my mind, in the camera of my eye, bounding away, away over the fence into the beyond.

My shot tips the scale, sends the birds south for winter, the deer elsewhere. My own thoughts flee toward whatever is next. The smell of an ending creeps in, my only shot ringing out across the openness. A tiny ribbon of smoke unfurls. Then, it too is gone — the barrel is empty. The dented can still stands on the fencepost. And, I am still there in the image of my memory, aiming at the skeleton of my own fear, the question of what will happen to us.

*

Twenty years later, I arrange myself in front of an undressed window. Winter light picks up my curves, while shadow clothes the places I wish to cover. Without shifting, I tap the remote trigger, holding down the button so the camera takes four or five shots. I click through the black and white frames, lower my shoulder, and adjust the loose whorl of hair escaping the bun at the nape of my neck. I push the button again.

Photography arrives in my life with the specific desire to comprehend my own wholeness inside a frame. This is why I photograph anything — still life, landscape, myself — to decipher life’s fractions and process splinters into cohesive meaning. In front of the window, I bring my aggregate self to life. I am both somewhere and elsewhere, concrete and ostensible—but, inside the boundary of a photograph, I am sewn together, whole.

My impulse to pose for the camera is not born from a desire to remember. I want the ability to look at myself simultaneously from inside and out, to see my internal, emotional landscape etched on the outside of me, manifested in the thereness of my body. This is the goal, the accomplishment, the art: to capture how I see myself, and to evoke who I am inside the frame. Each image is not a put-on portrayal, but a testimony of form. I am a material being made of flesh and bone, able to sit where I sit and collect light and shadow because I am here.

Light must attach itself to something. Some skin, some body. Some flesh. Or, mountain, or flower. A soft animal or hard subject. Some skeleton revealed when a closet door is flung open. This is how I become me — by seeing what the light creates when it lands on my body, my person. If the sun is behind me, and low enough, as that day in the field, I can see my shadow stretch long across the emptiness, camera in hand, poised to shoot.

*

In the field, I am at a crossroads, on the edge of my future, yet unwilling to launch myself into it. The future is, just then, the most frightening place I can think of. I don’t want to know what comes next — I can feel it bearing down on me but not yet articulate my longing to fit myself inside the frame of what is to come. I can’t see what’s in front of me. The more I resist time, the more quickly it arrives, keeps arriving, like a swollen river threatening to wash me downstream.

Back then, in the field, I don’t know it yet, but the camera and the gun will echo each other for years to come. Both reverberate my desire to take something with me. To understand my scattered life, possibly, but more importantly to stake my claim in a visual territory I call my own. At the time, when I stand in W.’s field, I can’t see it yet: how I am on a trajectory, how if I can focus on something, anything, for long enough, it will stay with me in my mind — a whole thought, an occupancy. A way to live.

*

I hold in my head a photograph of the field. It is not a photograph I can pinch with my fingertips or lay flat on a tablecloth. It exists only in my mind. What is a field but a frame?

That afternoon, it seems the future is already a memory, like we have already lived what is unfolding before us. I wonder how W. looks at me the way he does — like nothing of what I’ve experienced alone matters as much as what we are experiencing together. Outside this moment, there is nothing. There is just this — the barrel of a gun, an immense hayfield mown to winter nubs, and the cloak of twilight coming down.

Back then, I need the image of the field to fade, be replaced with a promise of what is to come. My fear knows there is nothing after this. There is only the worn shape of us there. The rest washes away with the darkness.

*

It ends between W. and I on a cold night in February, well over a year after the evening in the field. Rain streams down the windshield. We are parked in W.’s Jeep under a streetlamp in front of my freshman dorm. I tell him we are done. We must be. I can’t take it anymore, this future-blindness. I need to see what’s next, what lies beyond the frame we’ve been living in. I finally say what I’ve wanted to for so long: I am unhappy. I declare it, blurt it. I say I want to remain friends. Of course, I say this — I think it will soften the blow. But, I have pulled the trigger, and nothing can put a bullet back into the chamber of a gun that’s been shot.

When W. and I part ways, it is bittersweet how we usher each other into the past, into the shadows. We clear the image bare. Maybe that evening in the hayfield marks the last day we are happy.

*

It is interesting, the vocabulary we use about photography: shoot, capture, trigger, frame, take. There is violation inherent to any of these actions. The photographer takes a photo. Captures a subject. Subjectifies an object — that is, makes an object her subject. There is brutality in the language of a photograph, even though no one is harmed by the camera. It is the same language as shooting a gun.

I wonder about this violence. What do I capture of myself when I take and publish self-portraits? Do I give some piece of my own life away when I shoot photos of myself? I wonder, is it a violation or a celebration to share the photos I do? Take a photograph. Shoot a frame.

To some who view my self-portraits, my nakedness is weaponized. But, I am not sure I mean it that way. With my camera, I seize a single moment and take it with me. One instant out of a sea, out of infinity. What good does one moment do, when there are so many others? Context evaporates. A photograph silos time, preserves it, the same way a gunshot echoes across the distance, keeping alive the memory of the sound, the kick.

The photo of me in the windowlight hangs in the air. It is a placeholder, a deadness, a skeleton in the closet. I am whole, despite the infinity, the aggregation of moments surrounding this one. I am singular, past and present, found there inside the frame.

*

I remember raising the gun to my shoulder, the kick, the sound. The ringing in my ears. The smell of smoke. I miss the mark. W. tells me what to do every step of the way. I remember my fear. The bead, the trigger. The squareness of the field, us at the top of the rise, aiming at the can perched on the post. There’s nothing remarkable here, nothing to remember. Yet, I do.

After I shoot, W. hauls the gun to his shoulder and hits the can dead-on, knocking it from the post. It falls outside the perimeter, into the shadow, where I can no longer see it. In hindsight, I understand W. wants to teach me to shoot because it is new, a skill I don’t already know. Something I don’t realize is innate to me, my personality. He wants me to hit-or-miss, to see his black and white theology of yes or no in action. W. experiences the world in polarities, either/or. But, yes/and is closer to what I’m searching for, to what I deeply need. I am ready to aim and shoot, but the gun is the wrong tool. It is preemptory, foundational. The field — the gun — is a precursor to the future.

When I pick up a camera, I feel as though someone has given me eyes and finally told me to see. The camera in my hand is an extension of my eye. I understand immediately: my goal is not to shoot a straight line at a single target, but to reproduce thousands, millions of possible lines connecting me to innumerable facets of the world around me.

Even though it is W. who forces the gun in my hands and makes me shoot it, the field is my own epiphany. The action itself grabs hold of me. I want to focus, to shoot. This is my birthright as an artist. I will desire this action again and again — but, that evening in the field, I only take one shot, put the safety on, and place the gun on the ground.

*

When we leave the field, the first star twinkles low on the horizon. W. retrieves the coffee can and swaddles the old gun in the quilt from the back of his Jeep. Again, he gets out, shuts the green gate behind us after we drive through. Night swallows the field in the sideview mirror, as if we were never there.

Back then, I want the field to hem me in, narrow my choices, tell me what it is I’m supposed to want. Tell me what the future is. Instead, the field pries the question open wider. W. and I have done all we will do here — there’s nothing left to guess at, except how our ending will go.

There is no going back, except in memory. Any glance into the past is skewed, because it is seen through eyes that no longer exist. I am no longer who I was back then, in the field. The sun drops low, going, gone. It leaves the day behind.

*

For a while, it bothers me that W. and I stop loving each other. We just cease, abruptly resenting one another for the ways each of us fall short of the other’s expectations. Yet, for the longest time, we can’t let each other go.

I call W. once after we break up, to ask him about a rumor I’ve heard —that he used to mess around with a friend of mine while he and I were still together. It’s the picture in my head of the two of them that makes me unable to move on. Just be honest, I beg into the receiver, standing in the living room at my parents’ house, spring light streaming through the blinds, striping the far wall. He laughs, a dismissive little laugh, and says, no, that never happened. Somehow, it hurts to know we hurt each other for so long, when we could have just relinquished each other to the future.

*

A photo is a retrieval. A going back. It conveys a moment already passed by the time it is seen. Isn’t this memory? There is no way to return, to live anything over again, even shooting a gun in a field at twilight. Memory is the only anchor mooring me to who I was back then.

A photo is a skeleton, a fossil. It marks a deep dive into shape and structure and meaning and shadow — into thereness, existence — both of the thing itself and of the image of the thing itself. A photo is marked territory, four corners and whatever lies inside the perimeter. The field, too, has four corners, its fence a boundary signifying possession. Where one’s land ends, another’s begins. Here, the ending and beginning occupy the same line — the fence marks the overlap between past and future, between W. and I. Whatever lies outside the fence is what is next. Whatever lies outside the frame cannot touch us, yet.

*

I am wondering, just now, whose closet I am a skeleton in. W. places the can and strides toward me, crossing the distance between us, to show me how to shoot. We are together, but separate, our apartness evident to me for the first time. First love ends slowly, painfully. Is there ever an exception to this? It’s hard to know when to let go. To let the bullet leave the chamber and never look back.