in my early twenties, I took a selfie almost every day. I stood in front of a bright white light. I waited until the sun melted on my cheekbone in a sheath of glitter. I turned into a smooth glass plate. I knew my best angles—I glanced to the left as if someone had just said my name. my collarbones poked through my t-shirt. I pushed my shoulders forward until a sliver of shadow appeared there. a bowl. a small cavern a man might want to drink from, his tongue resting in the pit of my neck.

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, writes that there is “something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves.”

I am forever seen in ways I do not see myself. I am a myth in each image. I am prey, shedding feather and scale.

I become obsessed with watching videos of people opening pearl-heavy oysters soaked in formaldehyde. it’s a pyramid scheme, of course. the pearls are often commercially farmed freshwater pearls being inserted into saltwater oyster shells, of course.

in my mind, everyone is always watching me. everyone is peering into my windows. watching my flickering shadow peel clothes off behind my curtains. this is what keeps me company. even if I am alone, maybe someone watches me from afar, and from that distance, I look smooth and hairless

and sculpted. I look peeled as a fresh orange undressed from its skin, its shaggy pith. glistening, juice-heavy and oozing with sweetness.

Sontag writes that “whatever the camera records is a disclosure”—a secret. something hidden and revealed. a photograph is easier to take than a secret is to keep. and so it is taken. the flash peels off my clothes. it slips a strap from my shoulder and drags it further down.

a man takes a picture of me in a bar and his laugh falls across my skin like hail

a man photographs my body as it jumps from a cliff into a clear blue lake.

a man sitting next to me on an airplane texts his girlfriend that I disgust him.

a man

a man

a man

                           takes a picture

                           photographs

                           texts

                                                                skin

                                                                blue

                                                                disgust

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, writes: “But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing.” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it.”

there is a special vulnerability in the photograph I know. in the white flash of a camera. I used to imagine how many photos I was in the background of. how many strangers had pictures of me? how out of focus my face. my body. how mortifying. I cannot pluck myself out of the photograph. I live inside of it forever.

Sontag writes that a photograph can mutate into an “emblem of desire”—a way of “imprisoning reality.” and so the lens is a cage. the lens of a camera, in its bulbous shape and fragile glass. the lens of an eye—the precision of its stare. one cannot help being looked at. it is something out of our control. who says desire cannot be easily confused with hate?

you can tell if a pearl is real by rolling it around in your mouth. against your tongue. an artificial pearl feels too smooth, like glass. but a real pearl feels rough—it scrapes the inside of your cheeks and reminds you that it came from something alive.

I take so many photographs that I never look at again. fireworks shows. flowers. sunsets. dust clouds forming in the sky. my body writhing in front of a mirror, trying to find the best shapes or illusions. I take picture after picture and never delete them. the back of my head. my cat.

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, writes, “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

the photograph repeats, and so do I—I see myself mirrored in apparition. I ask myself the same questions, over and over, and my body follows. it answers. it learns and unlearns its movements.

one after the other, hosts peel the softened shells of oysters apart and pull bright pearls from the slippery and dead flesh. a Pepsi blue!! one shrieks. what a gorgeous blush another croons. they measure each orb with a pair of calipers and hold it up against their palms until the camera focuses. they read comments off their screens as the live video streams on. thank you, baby, order in bio, free oyster with first purchase. I watch for hours, never feeling the desire to purchase but feeling pulled by the crack of the oyster knife, the glossy white of the shells, the dimpled flesh torn apart with their fingernails.

how many minutes do I have left to believe I am beautiful? how long until someone takes my face in their hands and looks at it, not with scrutiny, but with softness? maybe they will kiss my neck. my rough elbows. the tiny hairs on my collarbone. the fold of my chin, the round curve of my back.

Sontag writes that nothing that is photographed is ugly. even if it is ugly, if it is photographed, it automatically becomes beautiful. this gives me peace. when a stranger took a photograph of me jumping from a cliff into a clear lake, I was a beautiful something. a bird in flight. an angel descending from blue, a mermaid, a girl, a myth.

the image of the woman is stolen. she becomes an apparition. she becomes a negative. a transparent and backwards image on film.

when a man in a bar turned his phone camera towards me, the flash slicing through my eyes, he must have thought I was beautiful. even in my hunch over the bar top, laptop glow pooling across my face, I became stunning. a glory of nature. phenomena.

Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” writes that “the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in context, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.” she is always a contradiction in her desire to be seen. in her hope to be invisible. she is a threat you can touch and take. take a picture. it will last longer.

pearls are a form of defense, created when a parasite enters the shell of an oyster or mussel and threatens their inner softness. the pearl holds the threat inside and hardens in a sphere around it. each pearl is a danger disappeared, a parasite toughened into shine.

Sontag claims that “the history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives:” beauty and truth-telling. which is to say that sometimes, a photograph is a lie. the photograph is slippery—it plucks a moment from time and keeps it in a box. it is framed by the lens. by our vision. by the time and place in which we see it.

I am not sure what I would prefer to believe: is the photograph something beautiful or something true?

I watch the live streams of the woman shucking oysters, and even though thousands are tuned in at the same time, I feel like she is watching me. she speaks my name out of the corner of her mouth. she gathers pearls in her palms and they clack and shift and shuffle and look like candy or fish eggs and she holds them out to me until they fill my mouth and rub against my teeth and I am sure, in that moment, that the pearls are gritty and real. that the oysters are dead and gasping.

I create an imaginary world, and in it, men look at me with admiration. I am terrifying and beautiful. I am soft and full of blood. they whisper and gaze at me and whip their heads away when I catch their stares. they only speak of my beauty and how they wish they could touch me. I walk through this world, and it coats me in a sheet of milk. it is a sweetness. it is the color of a clean bone.

I want to follow the pearls home.