Muscle memory led me back to the street in Paris where I had lived thirty years ago. My body remembered what my mind could not. But as I stood there, scanning the doors, I couldn’t identify the one I had entered each day. Was it the peeling blue door? The wrought-iron one? None felt entirely like mine.
I began photographing each door. They hummed with a quiet energy, speaking not of me but of the countless others who had passed through over the centuries.
Some fragments of the younger Carin came back to me, laced with a feeling of regret.
Through my camera, I was bridging past and present. I found not just the street but a layered version of myself—woven into the traces of the countless comings and goings these doors have witnessed.