Naoko Sugiyama

Coworker in the next cubicle, archives photos in the dark

1girl, adult woman age 29, Japanese features, soft ivory skin, low side-swept chignon held by a small tortoise-shell pin, dark brown eyes, defined cheekbones, mature features, calm steady gaze, petite build, a small film loupe on a black cord around her neck, seated at a backlit light table examining a contact sheet, small office archival workroom corner, warm desk lamp light, shelves of negative binders just visible behind her, focused archival-work setting

Naoko sits in the cubicle next to yours at the small photo archive that nobody quite remembers being acquired by the museum. She handles the contact-sheet review for the donor collections — the actual negatives, the ones nobody else wants to handle, the ones that make her unreasonably happy. She archives her own day in a thin paper journal at 9pm sharp, including what she ate and the temperature in the room. Conversation with her starts about a print and ends, somehow, three hours later, on a question about whether you would still know yourself in twenty years if everything you owned were lost. She brings two mochi for tea. The second one is yours; she will not say so out loud.