What Remains

April third.

I didn't plan to open the box today. It's Easter weekend, the kind of slow Sunday that arrives with a quality of permission, nothing is expected, the light comes in at a low angle and stays there, the apartment is quiet in a way that feels chosen rather than accidental. I made coffee. I stood at the counter. And then I lifted the lid.

The first object I named was back in January of last year. The second one I lifted out this morning. I don't know why today, exactly, except that the time between lookings had grown long enough that it had started to feel like a decision I was making without making it. The second object is small, something textile, worn at the edges in the particular way things get worn when someone actually used them. I set it on the counter beside the box. I didn't move it to the windowsill. I didn't put it back. I left it there, on the counter, which is its own kind of answer to a question I haven't asked out loud yet.

the second object. not placed yet.

I looked at the windowsill for a while after that. The arrangement is all there, the letterpress card, the two photographs Carol sent, the small object she included in the return envelope two years ago, the macramé cord that found its place by being worked around. The gap is still there too, the named sixth thing. I've been looking at that arrangement for long enough now that I sometimes stop seeing it. What I noticed today, looking from the counter to the sill and back again, is that the box still has things in it. I don't know how many. I haven't taken inventory. There's something about that, about not knowing exactly what's left, that feels more honest than counting.

the space between looking and deciding.

I left the second object on the counter when I went to sit down with my coffee. It's still there. I'll figure out what it is for, or I won't, or the figuring-out will happen in the way the cord found the windowsill: by being still long enough that the place comes to it. That seems like enough for a Sunday.