My mother’s closet was long and narrow with low ceilings and deep purple carpet. As a little girl I spent a lot of time in her closet; when she was gone I felt close to her there. She never got rid of anything. Inside that carpeted cavern I inspected evidence of the years before I existed; before she became a single mom and worked in sales, before she curled her hair and dyed it blonde.

I religiously crawled into a corner in the back of the closet to visit a wooden jewelry box with a glass top, etched on the glass top was a boat, probably a gift from her mother. Inside that jewelry box I’d paw at the wooden beads she’d earned as a girl scout, and the lilac crochet choker that she knit to wear on the beach as a teenager. That was back when she was a hippie and didn’t wear shoes for an entire summer, and had hair down to her waist: she told me stories of ironing her own hair on the ironing board so that the waves would lay flat.

Close by, sandwiched in between pairs of heels, lived a shoebox that read Nine West. Nine West was filled with photographs of mom in her early 30s. I loved mom in her 30s, it was still before me, but I feel I was there somehow, maybe just in the air. That shoebox was where I found the nudes my father had taken of her. I had seen my mother naked before, but there was something different about seeing her body through my father’s eyes. I love the way she pretends she doesn’t notice the camera, deep in a magazine read.

A couple weeks ago my mom texted me the photograph and I didn’t know how to tell her I’d looked at the photograph so many times before.