emotions with longer names

“Why are you holding a camera?” Her eyes flickered to look at his. She possessed no poker face—her discomfort made him smile, even now.

“I don’t know,” replied a disembodied voice. The sound of his words made his heart beat faster, made the memories come rushing back in some horrific nightmarish image of a carnival ride.

She displayed her white teeth to him in an awkward smile, the flashing red light reflected in her eyes. They weren’t looking at the camera—they were looking at him.

“Talk to me,” he said, loving to film the shape of her face in all that silence but knowing her awkward quirks.

“I don’t know what to say.” Her voice was quieter than normal, and scarlet stop signs were ebbing at her cheeks.

“Say anything,” he commanded in a voice heavy with anticipation. His vowels were richer than a gourmet bagel caked in strawberry cheesecake cream cheese.

She bit her lip, and he could see the cartoon bubble appearing above her furrowed brow—I’m thinking.

“John Cusack,” she whispered to the floor.

“What?” he snapped to attention idiotically.

She cleared her throat. “John Cusack,” she said again, with more confidence. “Say Anything. Famous for the scene when he held the boom box outside her window.”

He heard himself smile and imagined his circulatory system settling down for a relaxing game of chess, even though his current pulse was more like monarchs with sledgehammers—jackhammers, too.

“I love that you said ‘boom box’ instead of ‘stereo.’”

She was turning red again but didn’t want him to stop. He could tell that her eyes were looking at his own again. Lost in a moment where the existence of the camera was forgotten, she let her guard down, and a genuine smile grew from the corners of her lips that commanded the fluorescent lights to halo her bright blonde head.

He paused the tape so that her happiness occupied the dimensions of his bedroom television. This was hard. No, this was more than hard. He had known it was going to be. Her incandescent smile warded off his tears and coaxed him to hit play.

“You look beautiful,” he said along with himself as he stared at her.

Her smile grew larger, and he bathed in the melody of her laughter.

“What?” he said, laughing along with her. He never could keep a straight face when hers was so happy. He knew that her happiness was meant as an invitation, and he was a loyal party-goer who R.S.V.P.-ed almost as soon as he heard the clang of the mailbox and the echo of the postman’s footsteps on the little stretch of concrete path in front of his house.

“Well Mr. Filmmaker,” she looked at him again. He could see the girl who wasn’t afraid of being on camera or eating octopus on a first date appearing before him. “You should be very familiar with the rating system, yes?”

He heard himself exhale quickly, the way he did when he was in a laughing mood. “Of course.”

“Well then. Due to the fact that your parents could stumble upon this—I mean, anything is a possibility—I’d say we’d do best to keep this PG, correct?”

He laughed. “Correctamundo.” He flinched at the memory of saying that. It was so passé, and he remembered how she used to give him a hard time about his vocabulary.

She raised her eyebrows with a half smile, a flag that told him the vocabulary rip was understood.

There was a glint in her eye, and he anticipated her line. “Then you do know that we’re going to have to turn this camera off in order for me to do what I want to do to you, right?”

She didn’t need his confirmation but immediately stood up from her spot on the couch that was, at present, three feet away from his quivering hands.

The camera spun in a series of bizarre angles that brought on nausea similar to that found during a bad bout with a tilt-o-whirl.

Then static decorated the reflections in his pupils. He didn’t notice, because he was still remembering her. Recalling the delicate pressure of her lips against his and wondering if it was wrong to love something so much. She made him feel every emotion, even the ones with longer names that he didn’t know existed, and still more.

He snapped out of his stupor, hastily wiping his face on his gray-sleeved forearm and wondering how long the static had been there until it was replaced a second later with her image again.

Her hair was just slightly longer. Her clothes were different. The grass visible through the living room window said that it was a mild winter. It was a new day. A new memory.

“And so the camera makes a dutiful reappearance,” she announced in an upper-class British accent.

“You don’t hate it, do you?” he asked sincerely.

“No,” she assured him. “It’s part of you—how could I?”

He smiled in front of the television set. She was so wonderful. He imagined her feeling as intensely for him as he did for her. He couldn’t believe it logically, but his romantic understanding had accepted the answer long before, and so he had to move on.

“How about now?” He flipped the miniature display screen so that it was facing her and she was forced to look at her own image.

Her eyes widened. “It’s weird…”

“How is it weird?” They always asked each other millions of questions, him especially. “Don’t even try to tell me you don’t like the way you look—that is so angst-ridden teenager.” He was using her words to keep the mood light, and her slight smile told him she knew it.

“It’s just…”she trailed off. He knew she was concentrating and not avoiding him, so he let her think.

“It’s different,” she started again. “Like…I know that I’ve seen myself in movie clips and even seen myself talking in front of a mirror. But. I’m not seeing a reflection right now. I’m seeing me in my real form. Forwards. It’s weird thinking about how easy it is to capture the real me so easily, especially right now. And two seconds from now, this will be me two seconds ago. It seems like film is one of humankind’s many attempts at achieving immortality. It’s weird to think how simple it is to achieve. That I could live forever in this memory. That we could be impermeable to change in this little setting. This nanoblip of our lives. It’s almost scary, but at the same time kind of comforting, you know?”

“Wow,” he breathed.

“What?” she asked, her mind bobbing to the surface of her thoughts.

“You never cease to amaze me.”

She smiled. She smiled a lot. She had an archive of smiles that she could use to fit every emotion and every situation. A number of them were exclusive to him, and he knew that. It just made him love her more.

“I’m glad that you let yourself be amazed,” she said with a mind and heart for only him.

He stopped recording, and the screen went black this time. His heart was screaming in agony while his mind was racking the carousels of memories and the photo booth picture strips he had kept in his bedside drawer.

He needed her closer to him. With every tape he watched, the more badly his body yearned for her touch, and the stronger his heart ached since it knew all of the dramatic irony that the videotapes were establishing.

But in the spaces where he forgot that he knew the ending, it felt like falling in love again. He noticed how she got used to the presence of the camera. Her blonde hair stretched more and more for her shoulders until it overcame its goal, and her soul seemed to be flying, no matter the time or the place or the situation. She was with him always, and so slowly she taught his soul to fly and his heart to race. She taught him how to work her Canon, and he developed an admiration for her photography. She breathed inspiration into his film, and he etched emotion into her still-life. They completed themselves with parts of each other, and they never tired of laughing. She still surprised him, and he still admired her.

It was getting to the end of his stack of tapes. His mind needed the resolution, but his heart was begging for mercy.

He delicately placed the last tape in the VCR and observed it blink into motion.

She was silent and dreaming underneath the covers of his bed. He hungrily watched her stomach rise and fall, his ears straining for the muffled sound of her even, spaced breathing. He felt as though he had melted into her, to understand and love her even while she was asleep.

He watched his prerecorded fingertips gingerly caress her shoulder, gently brushing away a few strands of that luminescent hair.

“I love you,” he whispered to her sleeping form.

He continued to watch the relaxation in her body. He knew she was comfortable and knew she was happy. And he understood that the calmness of her breathing was telling him that she loved him too.

The shot ended. It was the next day. They had both showered, and he was watching her shamelessly as she slipped into her clothing. He could hear her excitement as she literally sproinged all over his bedroom.

“We’re going for a drive,” she declared, as though it had been predetermined for years.

“Where to?” he asked her curiously, sensing an adventure on the way.

“You’ll see once we get there—it’s one of my favorite places in the world.”

“So I take it you’re driving? I better grab a helmet.” It was customary to joke like this, no matter the mood. Their record of conversations included many that contained every emotion. They could start crying and always end up laughing. It came standard with loving each other.

“Unless your extremely sexist mind has a problem?” she replied, knowing she had won a long time ago but having a good time through and through.

The camera followed them into her car. The weather outside was perfect, but they kept the windows up for the sake of the video camera.

They were just out of the driveway when the camera jostled around as he tried to click his seatbelt.

“Seatbelt?” He asked her as though he was the surgeon and she was the nurse. Maybe she was thinking of him being sexist again as she replied, “Nah, I live life on the edge.”

He heard himself laughing as the tears started to flow.

The radio played their favorite station, and he laughed as she developed driving dance routines.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “You’ll always be main stage—Justin Timberlake style. I could so be a back-up dancer.”

He laughed again, more and more. Being with her was everything.

She stopped at a red light.

“You know, I really hate this intersection. One-too-many roads go through it. People speed like crazy. Super annoying.” She was in her driving mode, the one where she said rather boring things to no one in particular—mostly to the windshield and, occasionally, a fire hydrant.

He stared at her. “I love you more than anything or anyone I’ve ever known,” he told her.

She looked him deep in the eyes.

The light turned green, so she stepped on the gas but didn’t eject him from her stare. So she didn’t see the truck in her rearview mirror. Her cerulean blue eyes looked their most sincere, their most genuine. She loved him so much.

“I lo-“ she started, but his yells drowned her out as he tried to grab the steering wheel. They were both terrified and screaming and then the crash happened. He was shaking to relive this, the noise of it was deafening—something like what he thought a tornado would be like. He heard the crunching of the metal as the camera was thrown from his hands—he wished that it had been destroyed so that he didn’t have to be here again. This was hell. Worse than hell. It was him breaking. He even heard the bones snapping, some of hers too. Nothing would stop moving. Eventually his screaming stopped as he lost consciousness.

Then everything grew silent. Well, almost silent. It sounded as though he could hear someone whispering, someone coughing.

His body went rigid. He felt like his heart had gotten switched in place of the human cannonball and was now miles away from him, speeding through the sky.

He could make out her words. Just barely.

“I…lo…(cough)…I love…you…”

Lying miles away in a deserted field, his heart shattered into twenty-one-billion pieces.

The battery of his camera died as the last memory he could ever have of her went black.

It was raining outside, but he didn’t seem to notice the dull pattering against his window panes. He fumbled in his pocket in search of his keys, found them, and rushed for the garage.

He didn’t buckle his seatbelt, almost wanting to die this time. Instinct led his car to the cemetery.

Raindrops mingled with the tears on his face as he searched for the headstone.

Her name was there, carved out in letters that were too stiff and too formal. He traced them with his quaking fingertips. They felt nothing like any part of her.

Finally he collapsed onto his knees, sobbing into the mud before his feet. For a while he cried too hard to speak. The words would get caught on their way up and would emerge as choked, passionate yells.

“I’m so sorry,” he coughed into the grass. “This is all my fault. I’m the one who never had the dreams! It’s because of me that you’ll never grow up to be a psychologist! It’s because of me that you’ll never see France! Everything turned out wrong. This isn’t how the story was supposed to end. I’m so sorry,” he choked and sputtered, consumed for several minutes by his tears. “I love you,” he whispered to the grass.

“I love you,” he repeated, louder. He recalled the memory of her confidence.

“I love you!” he shouted again and again, screaming himself hoarse into the vast emptiness of the black night.

It was a while before he noticed that the rain stopped. This calmed him suddenly and quieted his repeated proclamation.

He knew he needed to go home. When he got in the car, he fastened his seatbelt. His mind had done so much thinking that it was almost impossible to take in anything more. When he reached his room, he fell instantly into a long and sound sleep.



He dreamed of her sleeping body, of watching her chest rise and fall. He never drew his eyes away from her.

Just as he was waking up, she spoke to him. The memory of her voice felt old and untouched, like a sepia photograph in the recesses of ancient wedding albums.

“It’s weird to think how simple it is to achieve. That I could live forever in this memory. That we could be impermeable to change in this little setting. This nanoblip of our lives. It’s almost scary, but at the same time kind of comforting, you know?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I do know.”



The weather that day was perfect, and in the evening, the falling sunlight hit his couch cushions in golden stripes, delivering one of those exclusive smiles that only he would understand. It just made him love her more.