Near the end of that week you called. The sound of your voice was like two hands on my shoulders, shaking me awake. As we spoke, I saw my apartment for the first time in days. The dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry. I walked into the bathroom and saw my reflection in the mirror. I saw my self in my body again. I realized I’d mistaken coming undone for liberation. I had, I think, actually lost it. Lost myself. And you knew. You could tell something was wrong. You pried, but I was too embarrassed to tell you about the laptop. How absurd it would all seem. How could I even begin to explain it? You made me promise I would call you the next day. And I did.

A few nights later, Ana and our friend Nasra came over for dinner. Nasra was infinitely smarter than both of us and talked about an essay she’d just published in a prestigious art magazine about the late Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman’s film No Home Movie. The film focused on a series of conversations Akerman documented between herself and her mother — a Holocaust survivor — just months before her mother’s death. The conversations, documented in low-grade video reminiscent of a home movie, took place in the kitchen of her mother’s Brussels apartment and over Skype while Akerman travelled the world as a peripatetic filmmaker. While often quotidian in nature, the conversations gradually coalesced into a moving portrait of a daughter’s love for her mother and the anticipatory grief for her impending death. Akerman’s oeuvre was profoundly shaped by her mother, perhaps most notably her 1977 experimental documentary News from Home, in which she read letters sent between her and her mother over lingering shots of New York City, and her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a portrait of the daily mundanities of a Brussels housewife. When No Home Movie premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, it was booed. Akerman committed suicide a couple of months later.

“Not because of the booing,” Nasra clarified, circling the top of her beer bottle with her finger. “She didn’t care about criticism. She just never got over her mother’s death.” In the end it seemed they were inseparable. Like two bodies with a single self.