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Being selfish as I was when I was younger, when I received gifts on special occasions that didn't quite impress me to the standard I'd expect (like most spoiled children do), a festive blowout of dust collecting for the poor item would ensue in some untouched corner of my room. Probably disguised alongside a few books in my library or stashed behind a clothes cabinet where godknows what's crawled along there. That sounds like something I'd have done at that age.

Sometime over the last seven years, I've received at least two picture frames for my birthday, separately. I never much appreciated them, never had any use for them, and what became of them's beyond me, because little less than two years ago, I at last had a picture that I deemed necessary to be framed and those frames were nowhere to be found.

I went out to the nearest dollar store in town, paid for the nicest one out of the entire shelf, put the picture in, and every night before going to bed, I'd angle it slightly so that its front was in sight when I slept on my side facing the desk it stood on. An act of justifiable masochism from the heart.

And this continued nearly every night until the week of last Thanksgiving, when I crawled into bed one night and instead of angling the frame in my direction, set it face down, so that the leg it usually propped up against erected outward into the air.

Eventually the picture with the two smiling faces was removed and hidden, and remains so even until today. Now what's left is a plastic 4x6 picture frame painted a poorly reflective imitation-silver, and the uncertainty that if I so choose to hide this gaping reminder that I haven't got anything to fill it with, it won't disappear as I'd want it to like the other picture frames I once used to own.