The Camera in the Closet

There’s a camera in the back of my mother’s closet.

Old, dusty, and silent. The kind that needed film, that people took on vacations and honeymoons and birthdays.

It doesn’t work anymore. The lens is cracked. The viewfinder fogged over.

Still, it sits there, tucked beneath a folded blanket and a box of letters no one reads anymore.

It belonged to my sister.

Or maybe, it was the last thing that belonged to her when nothing else could.

I was thirteen when she died.

It didn’t happen all at once. She left in fragments.

First, she stopped coming to dinner.

Then, she stopped brushing her hair.

Then, one morning, I woke up to find her bed perfectly made, and my mother frozen in the hallway.

We never used the word suicide.

We said “it happened,” and moved on.

But the camera stayed.

A week later, I found it under her bed.

It still smelled faintly like her citrus shampoo—and something colder. Like metal. Or mourning.

The film was still inside. Half-used.

I held it like a question I didn’t know how to ask.

Maybe I was hoping there’d be nothing on it at all.

I never developed the photos.

But I never threw it away.

By seventeen, I was sleeping mostly on the floor.

The bed felt too big. Too hollow.

I told people I had insomnia.

The truth was, the dreams hurt more when they reminded you of what you lost.

Like a sister who took pictures of things no one else noticed:

Empty fields. Ugly dogs. The sky just before it storms.

Once, she said, “I take pictures of things people miss. That way, they exist twice.”

Her camera made things real.

When she left, everything blurred.

In college, I studied architecture.

I said I loved buildings.

Really, I just wanted to create things that stayed.

Permanent. Solid. Unlike people.

The camera lived in my desk drawer. Still undeveloped.

Sometimes I’d take it out, hold it to my eye, and try to see the world how she might have seen it.

Muted. Off-center. Beautiful—even while falling apart.

One time, my roommate asked why I hadn’t developed the film.

I shrugged. “Some pictures aren’t meant to be seen.”

He didn’t get it. I didn’t expect him to.

Grief isn’t a book everyone can read.

Last Christmas, I went home.

The house felt smaller.

The air smelled like cinnamon and things left unsaid.

My mom was quieter than usual. We exchanged gifts.

I gave her a mug.

She gave me a box.

Inside was the camera.

Same cracks. Same weight. But something had changed.

The film was gone.

“I thought maybe it was time,” she said softly.

Her eyes were wet, but she didn’t blink. “Do you want to see them?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I whispered. “I think I already have.”

She smiled like she understood.

Maybe she did.

Maybe some photos don’t belong on paper.

Maybe they live better in the places we don’t look—

in the back of a closet, in the curve of a memory,

in the quiet after a door clicks shut.

The camera lives on my shelf now.

I still haven’t seen the pictures.

Some nights, when the city’s too loud and the sky’s too empty,

I hold it again, feel the weight of it in my hands,

and remember what it means to carry something fragile.

And I think of her.

The way she laughed with her whole chest.

The way she always knew where the light would fall in a room.

The way she made anything feel important—just by aiming her lens at it.

I never said goodbye.

Not really.

But the camera did.

It said, Look closer.

It said, Even forgotten things deserve to be remembered.

It said, I was here.

And I believe it.