Selfies
When you laugh it’s genuine. I can see it in the crinkles around your eyes.
You send me selfies. Sure, I ask you for them sometimes. For work. For the social media accounts I manage, when you go to donor events or student receptions, and it’s a time when I can’t stay late or come in on the weekend.
Sometimes I think about ways to be there. Like, I could tell Mick its mandatory, all the leadership team has to be there. It sucks. No one wants to work late, I’d tell him.
But I’d want to be there, taking your photo, staying close to you. Listening to you introduce yourself, a silent observer by your side, because I’m not someone anyone needs to know.
You have this smile that is the brightest I’ve ever seen. Mick doesn’t smile. He never has. Unless he’s been drinking and then it’s a smile that is a notch away from a sneer. And you laugh, throw your head back, and it’s not like the other executives with their fake chuckles. When you laugh it’s genuine. I can see it in the crinkles around your eyes.
When I can’t be with you at the after hours things, I text you reminders to send me pictures. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don’t. I know you hate asking people to pose with you. And I get it. It’s awkward for a middle-aged guy to ask students or donors to take a photo with him. It’s easier for me to say I’m taking them for the university’s social media, do they mind a quick snapshot. Everyone says yes to me.
Even you on the rare occasion when I ask if you want to get a photo together, just the two of us. I have a handful of selfies of us. Not many. Because I don’t want you to know how I feel. And I never post them on social because I’m worried Mick, or someone else will see it and jump to conclusions. And they’d be right.
The first selfie I ever took of us was a rare night when I did go to a weekend event, filling in for a last-minute cancellation for a sick co-worker who couldn’t make it. Tickets were $200 a piece, too much of an expense to go to waste. That night I wore my favorite blue dress, and you drank wine, maybe more than you normally would have, knowing I was driving you back home. The whole night you radiated out, smiling at politicians, businessmen, partners from other universities, and you’d circle back to me, like you were checking on me, making sure I was okay.
At the end of the night, when most everyone else had departed, we sat together during the auction portion of the evening. And I leaned close to you and said, “Let’s get a photo.” Your face a little rosier than normal, your eyes squintier. It was only two years ago, but we both look younger, hopeful, comfortable with your suited arm leaning back against the blue fabric of my dress.
And even though I’ve never asked, you sometimes send me selfies when you are out of town. Visiting family, vacation, holidays. You send photos in the snow or on the beach, running through the state capital on a work trip before a conference. A photo of your toes in the sand at some tropical destination. Photos that aren’t meant for the work social media account.
And it’s got to be flirting. A little bit, at least. Like the emojis you send when we text. That’s what I thought for the longest time.
Until you sent me the last picture and I noticed the timestamp on it. Hours before you sent it to me. So now I have another theory. One that makes more sense. You are taking those selfies for someone, a woman you love, and sending them off to her first. And I am receiving second-hand images, the patina of affection meant for someone else reflecting from my screen.
Melissa Flores Anderson has published work in swamp pink, Chapter House and HAD. Her full-length short story collection All and Then None of You is out September 2025 (Cowboy Jamboree). She is a reader/editor for Roi Fainéant Press and EIC of the Broken Hearts Gallery Literary, an Instagram lit project.
