Dad loved swimming. Then he became afraid of everything. Then he forgot how to swim. He would smile at this picture.

This is part of an ongoing series about my father—or rather, about what I didn’t know about him. I took this photograph as a teenager, when I didn’t yet understand that he was suffering from depression. I thought he was simply an introvert. I didn’t know that one day he would get sick and decide that the past was where he wanted to live.