My friend Amos found some old photos I must have left with him when I left Amsterdam. He found them in a box he’d taken from Amsterdam back to Israel and hadn’t opened in years. I remember I left the photos with him when I came to Australia because I planned to go back.

The first photo arrived in WhatsApp at 4.41am. I heard the phone ping and decided whatever it was could wait. “Look what I found!” the message said when I finally attended to it. With exclamation marks because he was clearly excited. He kept sending photos that he found over the next few hours.

The first one was a black and white of the face I remember seeing in the mirror. A touch of a smile because I wasn’t very happy back then. Hunched shoulders and long hair framing the face. The tits were perkier though I was never very careful about my bras or ay of my clothes really. I bought them because they were pretty and took pleasure in wearing them no matter how they looked on me. I didn’t care. I walked around the world looking at everything else, not at myself.

I had handbags full of stuff back then too. There’s one in the photo. If memory serves me I think it was tan-coloured, a sack shape narrower at the top than at the bottom and probably contained one or two books. Sometimes I was afraid that I would finish my book so I carried a spare.

The next photo is me in white shirt and black pants sitting on a couch looking coquettish.

I hadn’t thought I could look coquettish back then, I assumed nobody liked me. I’m not sure where the picture was taken. There’s a photo of my red bean bag which I managed to stuff into a suitcase to take from Australia to Israel but never got round to bringing back. I’m sorting balls of wool; I think I was making a poncho then. All the girls from Argentina had beautiful warm ponchos and I wanted one too, so I knitted my own. It even had llamas on it. I remember the poncho, the wool, the bean bag but I don’t remember the place. It was a kitchen because there’s a fridge in the background.

There’s a picture of my mother. You can barely see her face, though you can see her smile. My parents came to visit me and decided to smuggle in electronic goods to fund the trip. They got caught. My parents lived with us a few months and a few months in Tel Aviv till the court case settled itself and they were allowed to go home. My mother had nothing to do all day so she cooked a lot. We’d come and visit and she’d feed us. She read a lot and so did my father when he wasn’t building models of boats. My mother can’t have had an easy life but she could always smile for the camera.

These photos are all 40 years old. I don’t know what’s happened to that person. I do remember being her. I’m not sure I’ve changed that much. I carried the weight of the world back then, but my horizons were enormous. I wanted to know everything. Now I look at new things and think I don’t really have time for that. Amos and I are old and my mother is dead. I don’t mind being old; once you get past the floppy tits and the constant aches. It’s something new in my life.