A mother and a father, two sons. Nobody in the photograph is posing for anything — it is 1982, film, the color already starting to go warm the way film from that decade goes warm, and someone has just said a name across the room and everybody's head has turned half a second too late for the shutter. The father is in a shirt with small stars printed on it, the kind of shirt you'd forget by lunchtime if you were in the room and remember for forty years if you were the son small enough to be carried.
The older boy is nine, maybe ten, and he is already standing the way an older brother stands next to a younger one — not touching him, exactly, but positioned so that nothing could get between them without going through him first. He does this in every photograph from that year. Nobody taught him to. He is not aware he is doing it.
The photograph sat in a drawer, then an album, then a shoebox, then a phone, for most of forty years. It did not mean anything in particular until the two boys in it were grown, and one of them had spent a decade mixing and packaging scent for other people's labels, and the other had spent that same decade writing things nobody paid him for, and they were trying to explain to each other, over a table, what a business they might start together would actually be about. Not what it would sell. What it would be about.
The photograph answered it before either of them could. A family is not the photograph. A family is the cabinet the photograph gets kept in, and everything else that gets folded and kept alongside it — a shirt, a letter, a smell that was in the house on a particular Sunday and is now attached, permanently and a little unfairly, to that Sunday alone.
Almario is the Filipino word, by way of the Spanish armario, for that cabinet. We are not precious about the etymology. We are precious about what a cabinet is for. It is where a family keeps the things it doesn't use every day but could not stand to lose — and a scent, more than almost anything else we know how to put in a bottle, is exactly that kind of kept thing. You don't wear it every day. You keep it, and on the day you need it, it is still there, still doing exactly what it did the first time.
That is the whole of what we're trying to build. Everything else — the books, the labels, the names — is in service of that one photograph and the cabinet it belongs in.