I.
I emailed my kid sister pictures I’d taken of my parents in November. Which is kind of crazy meta, if you think about it. My parents don’t even like people taking pictures of them, so the last time I was home, I basically never took my camera out of my bag. Until the very last night, when I frantically started taking pictures of everything, of my mother eating leftovers for dinner and my father striding late through Pearson to see me off.

II.

- Tell Ummah to let me buy a camera, says my sister on the phone.
- Why do you need a camera?
- Because I want to pictures of everything and nobody’s got a camera here. And Ummah said you already have one, but you’re in Vancouver. You can get them for 4$ at Walmart. Tell her.
- Those are disposable cameras. Don’t get those. How about you say it’s a camera for the family, instead of for you.
- So my sister yells into the living room on the other side of the continent, Ummah, can we buy a camera for everyone?
- Okay, says my mother.

III.
I have few, very few pictures of my parents, or even my siblings. My brothers are even more adamant about taking not taking pictures than my parents. So I take pictures of them asleep.

We grew up traditional that way, strict in that cleancut way that prohibited graven images. I still get uncomfortable in front of a lens, still feel every muscle in my face freeze on the other side of a camera. But I don’t know if those things are connected, or if it’s just that I’m still and always will be the girl who couldn’t stand mirrors.

But on the other hand, I have a picture from the terrible summer of two years ago that I took of my father, in his spotless white thobe and mosque cap, swinging on the swing in my aunt’s Scarborough backyard. These things are also true.

IV.
I don’t remember faces. The more a person means to me, the less likely I am to remember the way their lips would meet or the colour of their eyes. It’s as though I can only remember without my glasses on or contacts in.

I mean, when I think of you, I think now, with less and less clarity, of how the lightest touch of your hand on my skin always hurt like nothing else I’ve ever felt. But I can’t remember your face.

Except there are moments, for which I am never prepared, when suddenly, in the middle of some other thing I’m doing, an image of your smile, sharper than all the photographs I never took of you, interrupts me.

V.

VI.
Then the image fades, of your mouth and the bridge of your nose, and what I’m left with is not you, but the memory of remembering you.