The Girl in the Photo

A guest post by Ayotola Tehingbola

The girl in the photo tries to make sense of her life. She turns thirty this year. She thinks she does not have time. She believes she can be a writer. She writes dialogue on posts-its and makes up shopping lists for her characters. She buys a mechanical keyboard so she can hear the keys clack. She tells herself she needs to think. She schedules thinking time. She pretends she is doing something important. She takes photos of her desk and thinks, this is what it means to be a writer.

The night after her first therapy session she has a dream that she looked in a mirror and half of her face had collapsed. Half of her face couldn’t hold itself up and the skin lay crumpled. Blood vessels had burst in her eyes and she saw only red. She goes outside to ask for help. But nobody sees her. Nobody hears her. The girl is invisible.

She writes this down.

Her best stories come from dreams. A child running through a field, his back bloodied. He is clutching a finger. He meets a man with a hollow for an eye. A prostitute who meets the father of her child in a brothel. He eventually kills her. A father and son bound together by the umbilical cord the father ate at the son’s birth. A man in a red shirt tells the girl he will love her forever. The girl believes these dreams.

She writes. She cooks. She chews her pills. She takes photos of dead geese, dog shit, street signs, and neon lights. She takes photos of brown rotting leaves on the pavement, of the foam that sits on her beer, of her reflection in the glass. She takes photos of things she has taken photos of. She thinks she needs another creative outlet. Or her brain will rot.

She thinks of writing every day. Sometimes the words come to her, unimaginable strings of poetic sentences, words she could never have conjured. For reasons unknown, she lets these words go. She thinks she will remember. She knows she won’t. She tells herself she will write them down next time, the next time words press into her bone, an ingenious wounding. Sometimes she thinks it is her doing, this weaving deep inside of her. She knows it is not.

About the author:

Ayotola Tehingbola (’93, Lagos, Yorùbá) is a lawyer, photographer & writer. She is in the MFA Creative Writing program at Boise State University, Idaho. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Quarterly West, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pidgeonholes, You Need To Hear This, Kalahari Review, etc., and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She was published in the Best of the Net Anthology for 2023. She is the recipient of the Winter 2022 Karen Finley Scholarship for Women and Nonbinary Writers at Hudson Valley Writers Center, New York. She is also the recipient of a 2022 Glenn Bach Award for Fiction and an Alexa Rose Grant for her photography.