Inventory

What remains:

One sweater, too large, purchased in a city I no longer visit, worn now only on days when the grief is specific rather than general.

Two photographs of people who appear to be smiling. I keep them not for the faces but for the backgrounds: the particular shade of wall, the angle of a chair, the evidence that rooms existed where happiness was at least possible.

Three scars. One from surgery, neat, surgical, explained. One from childhood, its origin forgotten, its persistence a kind of loyalty to a self I cannot remember. One from a moment I will not describe, because the description would require a narrative I have not yet earned the right to tell.

Four books with underlined passages in a handwriting slightly smaller than my own, as if the person who made those marks was trying to fit more understanding into less space.

Five songs I cannot listen to without stopping whatever I am doing. They are not sad songs. They are songs that contain a door I once walked through and cannot walk through again, because the room on the other side no longer exists, because the person I was when I entered no longer exists, because the door itself has become a wall I keep running my hands across, hoping to find the handle.

Six addresses I still know by heart. None of them are mine. One belongs to a house torn down twelve years ago. One to a hospital whose name has changed. One to a person whose name has changed. One to a city whose streets I could walk with my eyes closed and still arrive nowhere I was trying to go.

Seven ways I have learned to say I am fine that are technically true and spiritually false. The fine of a parking ticket. The fine of a thread pulled so thin it disappears into what it was supposed to hold together. The fine of dust settling on objects no one touches anymore.

Eight hours of sleep, average, theoretical. The actual sleep is closer to six, interrupted by dreams in which I am always looking for something I cannot describe, in rooms that keep rearranging themselves according to a logic that makes sense only to the architecture of almost.

Nine people I could call at 3 A.M. I have called none of them. The not-calling is its own communication. It says: I am still trying to be the person who does not need to call at 3 A.M. It says: I am still pretending the night is manageable. It says: I am still here, which is not the same as being okay, but is, in the inventory of what remains, a category worth counting.

Ten years, approximately, since the last time I believed in a future that did not include the possibility of loss. I do not miss that belief. It was a brittle structure, built on the assumption that things could be kept. What I have instead is heavier and more durable: the knowledge that everything can be survived, even the surviving.

This is the inventory. It is not complete. It will never be complete. New items arrive daily, hourly, some so small they register only as a shift in weight, a change in the balance of what I carry and what carries me.

The inventory does not judge. It simply records. It says: this is what remains. It says: this is enough. It says: this, whatever this is, is still here.