In red suspender-shorts, diapers sticking out in the back, I squeeze between my aunt and mother; cat-eyed and sandaled, seated on an aluminum folding chair in front of our two-family house in the Bronx. I climb the concrete stairs, not alternating feet, turning to pose at each step. The camera follows me.

Sloped on an Adirondack Chair, I sip Coke from a green glass bottle, shovel muddy sand into a rubber pail at the shore, pull an oversized pink bow off a striped package on an apartment floor. Sprockets click and roll.

People pop in and out of the frame. Aunt Gussie sits on the steps of her new house in Queens wearing a flowered moo-moo, pushing windblown curls out of her eyes. Stanley barrels out of the house past his mother, and tiny Mitchel, with his toy gun and liquid eyes, steps in front of the camera. They’re all gone now, even tiny Mitchel. Gert and Manny smile and squint in the floodlights, cigarettes in hand, dancing in the soundless room. The parquets gleam. Karen, Sandra, and I hold hands and all fall down. 

Grey battleships loom over the river at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. An orangutan hobbles down a stone staircase with his enormous belly and human posture. A winter’s lake reflects white houses.

Each moving segment is a layer revealing an off-screen segment: my father shaving by a sink in the alcove of our room in the inn at Lakewood and my hand smoothing my mother’s velvet sleeve.

This is how my mind works: images, sensations, and moods. This is how my life works, especially now, especially here at the computer, sequestered. I used to like walking by the Hudson River, but not yesterday; obsessively calculating my distance from strangers, snickering under my mask at the unmasked and cavalier, holding my breath as runners come dangerously close; appreciating neither the journey nor the destination; exhausting joy.

My life is filled with eventless events: candles being blown out or the cake being cut. Is all of this distraction or points of focus?

After my mom died, I moved back into my childhood home. From the terrace I see the Manhattan Bridge peek out from behind new buildings, but on 8 mm film there’s a clear expanse of both bridges, ferries gliding on the bay, and my mother reading in the afternoon sun. I wash dishes but see my young self in a quilted robe drawing with a finger on the kitchen’s wintery window. I bathe in a tub surrounded by an adult remodel but remember when my knees were mountains rising out of the sea. This is how I live now: with double exposure while sheltering in place.