You smile. “What else?”

“We are on a bench, the picture taken from an angle slightly above us. You’re grinning as you always do, one arm around me and the other on my hand as I finger buttons on your coat. My other hand is on the bench beside me, holding me as I lean over to kiss your cheeks, rosy from the cold, just like our noses. Your eyes are closed, as are mine.

“My jacket is open, showing my sweater underneath, and our scarves are tangled together. My hair is pulled back out of my eyes, and matches the autumn leaves, auburn.” As I say this, I run the similar words through my head a few times, pausing to reflect on them. Autumn, auburn, autumn, auburn, autumn. “Your hair, brown, matches the trunks, the bench, our coats. All warm colors. All warm feelings.”

You lift your head off of mine, and we shift. You put the photo back on the table, turning in my arms, holding me out to look at me. You cannot see me. Your arms, resting at my shoulders, move to my face, and you use your thumbs to run them over my cheeks, dip into the curves and run them over bumps, memorizing how I feel, how I look. Your fingers stop at the corners of my mouth, and you use them as a guide as you lean in, kiss me. I smile.

“I love you,” you say, smiling. If you could see, you’d be searching my eyes for my reply. If you could see, you’d know I wasn’t looking at you, but past you, at the photo I described to you.

I don’t tell you that it’s not a picture of you and me. I don’t tell you I always lie. I don’t tell you it’s of the only person I will ever really love, the only person I have ever loved, that is in that picture with me. I don’t tell you that it is actually spring in that picture, not autumn, and that I am sitting in the grass, under a tree. I don’t tell you that I am not the only one turned, that both of the people in that picture, my love and myself, are kissing. I don’t tell you that I never did put up the picture of us in autumn in a frame, that it is in a box somewhere, with all of the other pictures of us. I don’t tell you that every frame is filled with only me and my real, true love, filled with her and me, filled with love.

Instead, I lie once more. I say, “I love you, too.”