"Hold still." It was something I heard over and over again growing up, as a neurodivergent kid constantly asked to quiet my body, control my focus, and behave. We say it to children, to our pets, to portrait subjects—spoken with care, but also with control. This image resists that request. This portrait reflects not just how I see, but how I might remember a loved one over time. Shot through a modified camera lens, the figure sits composed, blurred, dissolving at the edges. This person might be someone I once knew, someone I once was, or someone I'm trying not to forget. Memory can be rigid, cruel, and untruthful. The lens becomes a focused or unfocused point of conceptual transformation. Its distortions speak to the instability of memory—how our recollections soften over time, lose definition, and bleed into invention. Memory is not permanent. It's soluble. What appears to be a failure of focus is, instead, a deliberate act: a way to show how memory resists stillness—how vision may become a record of loss, and how the photograph falls short as a pointer, or trigger, to a clear memory, even in its stillness, continues to shift. Image description: A full-length, seated figure is positioned at the center of the composition against a light, neutral-toned background. The figure resembles a woman but the image is blurred with no diceranble gender, age or ethncity. The effect emphasizes dissolution, impermanence, and the softening of detail as a metaphor for how memory fades and becomes unreliable.