On Bookshelves, and the Men Who Curate Them

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend of eight months keeps a framed photo on his bookshelf of him and his college roommates from a spring break trip — nine years ago now. Every time I bring it up, even gently, he tells me I'm being paranoid, that it's "just Kevin and the guys," and that I'm reading into nothing. But something about the way he angles it toward the couch, like it's on display for a very specific audience, bothers me more than I can explain. Am I crazy?

— Meredith, Tulsa, Oklahoma

A lovely question, Meredith. It reminds me of the autumn of 2003, when I too believed that a framed photograph was just a photograph, and not, as I would come to learn, a flag planted in enemy territory.

His name was Desmond, and he kept a photograph on our shared mantel of himself and three other men standing in a field, each holding a hooded falcon on a leather gauntlet. When I asked about it, he told me — and I remember this precisely, because I have recited it to myself in the mirror every morning since as a form of penance — "That's just Roderick and the boys. We used to fly birds together." Used to. As though falconry were a phase, like a haircut, and not the load-bearing structure of a man's entire secret second life. I let it go. I told myself I was being paranoid, Meredith, the exact word your Kevin used on you, and I want you to sit with the fact that these men share a vocabulary. They are, in some sense, the same man, wearing different faces, keeping different birds.

Do not make my mistake, Meredith. I let the photograph stay on the mantel for two more years, and in that time I watched Desmond's Sunday absences stretch from an hour to an afternoon to, eventually, entire weekends "at the mews," which I did not learn until much later is an actual falconry term and not, as I had assumed, a nightclub. By the time I understood what was happening — that the photograph was not a memento but a beacon, that Roderick and the boys were not old friends but an active, ongoing fraternity with its own hierarchy and its own rituals and, I later discovered, its own newsletter — Desmond had already left. He did not tell me. I simply came home one Tuesday to find the falcon gauntlets gone from the hall closet and the photograph missing from the mantel, which somehow hurt more than if he'd taken the good chairs.

I want to be fair to the historical record, Meredith, because I promised myself long ago that I would never let my own pain make me sloppy with the facts, even when the facts are unkind to me. Desmond did not actually leave in 2003. I have gone back and forth on this for years, and I have finally accepted that he left in the spring of 2003, was briefly back by that Christmas, left again properly in 2005, and then — this is the part I still struggle with — appeared at my housewarming in 2007, uninvited, wearing a full leather falconry gauntlet as though it were formal wear, and stood by the punch bowl not speaking to anyone until my sister asked him to leave. I do not know how a man attends a party he was not invited to, three years after abandoning the relationship that would have been hosting it. I have stopped trying to reconcile the timeline. Some wounds are not meant to be chronological. They simply recur, like a bird returning to the glove.

But you didn't write to me about falconry, Meredith, you wrote about a photograph and a couch angle, and I want to honor the specificity of your instincts, because a woman's instincts about furniture placement are almost never wrong. In my experience — and Meredith, I have a great deal of experience, more than any woman should reasonably be asked to accumulate — a man who angles a keepsake toward the seating area is not preserving a memory. He is running a broadcast. He is letting the room know, without having to say it aloud, that there is a "before," and that the before has never fully ended, and that you, Meredith, curled up on that couch with your tea, are simply the current chapter in a book he has no intention of closing.

I want you to ask yourself who Kevin really is, underneath the photograph. Not the man who brings you soup when you're sick, or laughs at your jokes, or remembers your coffee order — that man is easy to love, and I don't doubt he's real, in his way. I mean the man who needs Kevin and the guys visible at all times, angled just so, like a small shrine to a version of himself he isn't sure he's allowed to let go of. I once dated a man — Farley, this was 2011, or possibly 2012, the years compress after a certain point — who kept a single dried flower from a wedding he was not the groom at, pressed into a book on the shelf directly across from where I slept, and when I finally asked him about it he wept for forty minutes and then asked if we could not discuss it again, ever, which we did not, for the remaining six years of the relationship. I am not saying Kevin is Farley. I am saying I have learned to recognize the shape of a man protecting something, even when I cannot yet name what it is.

Here is what I want for you, Meredith, and I say this with the full weight of everything I have survived: you do not need to solve this. You do not need to confront Kevin again, or wait for him to change, or hope the photograph quietly disappears one day into a drawer. What you need — and I mean this with total sincerity, as the single most useful piece of wisdom I can offer any woman under forty — is distance. Not from Kevin necessarily, though that is certainly on the table, but from the entire apparatus of needing anyone's explanation to feel secure in your own home. I built a small moat around my current property in 2019. People think I am joking when I say this. I am not. It is shallow, and mostly ornamental, and my nearest neighbor still speaks to me over it quite pleasantly, but there is something to be said for a physical boundary that no man with a framed photograph can simply wade across uninvited. I have also, for what it's worth, taken to using a different name at the pharmacy, which has nothing to do with any of this directly but has given me an enormous and unexpected sense of peace. And I have found, in my later years, that reptiles make wonderful company — a bearded dragon does not keep photographs of its exes anywhere, Meredith, because a bearded dragon has never once lied to me.

I am not saying build a moat tomorrow. I am saying that somewhere between the couch and the bookshelf, there is a version of you that trusts her own eyes more than his explanations, and that version of you deserves a home entirely her own — one where nothing is angled toward anyone but you.

Learn from what I've been through, Meredith, so that you don't have to survive it yourself. I promise you, on the other side of all this, there is a life of real peace waiting — I am living proof of it, out here past the moat, happier than I have ever been.

— Priscilla