We Only Fell in Love in Photographs

Story

We Only Fell in Love in Photographs

In our photographs, we were perfect.

You’re leaning against me in the café on 8th Street, your laughter caught mid-bloom, my hand curled loosely around yours as though I had always known where it belonged. The window light brushes your hair into gold, and I look at you the way people look at sunsets — certain it will fade, but unable to look away.

I keep that photo in a box under my bed, next to the ones from the pier, the winter market, the rainstorm in June when we ran through the streets with our shoes in our hands. Each image is proof — not of love as it was, but love as we wanted it to be.

Outside the frame, things were different.

We were quieter then. Our words began to land with a thud, not a spark. Your smile — the one in the pictures — grew rare. I learned that the spaces between moments can feel longer than the moments themselves.

But in photographs, the silences didn’t exist.

There was only the way your arm found its way around my shoulder at your cousin’s wedding, the way my head tilted into you without thinking. The way we looked, not at each other, but toward some imagined future.

We had started taking more photographs in those last months. I don’t think either of us noticed at first. Every coffee date, every walk in the park, every dinner with friends — all punctuated by the pull of a phone from a pocket, a subtle turning toward the light.

Click.

And for that fraction of a second, we loved each other again.

It wasn’t the kind of love that fixes things. It was the kind that makes you look at an image later and think, Maybe we were better than I remember.

When we finally ended it — on a Wednesday, over the phone, because we couldn’t find the energy to meet — I scrolled through our gallery. My thumb hovered over the delete button, but I didn’t press it.

I kept them.

Not because I thought we’d find our way back, but because they felt like little glass cases around the rare times we did work. We were good in stillness, terrible in motion.

Sometimes I wonder if we fell in love at all, or if we only fell in love with the versions of ourselves that the camera caught — the ones who never argued about dishes, who never fell asleep back-to-back, who never sighed when the other spoke.

The camera didn’t catch the afternoons we sat in silence, pretending to be busy. It didn’t catch the way I flinched when you said my name like it was a chore. It didn’t catch the moment I realized your hand had grown still in mine.

What it caught was beautiful.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe love doesn’t have to be true to be worth remembering. Maybe some stories only exist in photographs — perfect, frozen, untouched by the truth that lives outside the frame.

When I look at us now — your head tilted back in the park as leaves fall around you, my hand brushing your cheek on the subway platform — I feel the ache of something we never were but always wanted to be.

We didn’t love each other in life.

We loved each other in pictures.