[ inventory, incomplete ]
Pearl button, ½ inch, slightly yellowed
You hold it to the light and it does not become translucent. You were told once that real pearl lets light through. Or was it the opposite. You hold it to your teeth and it is smooth, which means — you can't remember what it means.
She kept buttons the way some people keep secrets: sorted by color into repurposed mint tins, each tin labeled in a handwriting you will never be able to replicate on forms that ask for next of kin.
You put the button in your left palm. It weighs almost nothing. You close your hand.
Seam ripper, wooden handle, blade dulled
For undoing.
She used the word unpick. Never rip. "You unpick it and you start again." As though the cloth remembered nothing. As though you could return thread to a state before it had been asked to hold something together.
You are thirty-four. You have unpicked two apartments, one marriage, a name you wore for six years and returned like a coat that never fit but was expensive enough to keep trying.
The blade is dull now. You press your thumb to it anyway.
Thread, color: not quite white
Ecru. She would have known the word. She knew the words for colors that lived between colors — puce, celadon, umber — and you grew up thinking these were places. Small towns in the country she came from and did not discuss except in the language of fabric.
The curtains there were always umber.
Your grandfather's uniform was not green, it was —
She would stop. The sentence would end at was and you learned not to fill it.
Measuring tape, cloth, marked in inches on one side and centimeters on the other
Two systems for the same body.
She measured you every birthday. Height, yes, but also: wrist, neck, the span of your hand, the distance from shoulder to elbow. She wrote the numbers in a small notebook you have not yet found in the box and are afraid to find and are afraid not to find.
What were the measurements for. You asked once. She said, So I know you.
As though a body could be known by its distances from itself.
Needle, bent
Not broken. Bent. She would not have thrown it away.
There are people who discard what bends and people who keep bending things back. You come from the second kind. This is not a virtue. It is a diagnosis.
You wrote that in a journal once, at twenty, meaning your mother. Now you are not sure who you meant.
Pincushion, tomato-shaped, red faded to the color of —
You don't have a word for the color. She would have.
Inside the tomato there is a smaller shape, a strawberry, attached by a thread. You bit into it as a child and your mouth filled with something like sand. Emery, she told you. For sharpening. You cried. She did not comfort you. She handed you a glass of water and said, Now you know.
Now you know.
You are not sure what you know.
Photograph, folded twice, creased at the face
A woman you do not recognize standing in front of a building you do not recognize in the city she did not name. The fold runs through her mouth. You cannot tell if she is smiling.
On the back, in pencil, faded: before.
Before what. You turn it over and over as though the answer will appear on a third side.
Thimble, silver-plated, dented
It does not fit your finger. It fit hers. You try your pinky, your ring finger. Too small.
She had hands like yours — this is what your mother says. Your mother says this as an offering, a bridge, a way of stitching the dead to the living, and you accept it the way you accept all such offerings: silently, with both hands, looking at the place where it is already fraying.
Scissors, small, shaped like a crane
The beak is the blade. You open and close them. The bird bites air.
She cut everything with these. Thread, fabric, the stems of herbs from the garden, a newspaper clipping about a war she would not specify, once — you remember this, or you have been told this so often it has replaced memory — the hair from your face while you slept on her lap, so gently you did not wake.
You did not wake.
The box itself: wooden, unlined, smelling of cedar and something else
You have catalogued everything. You have laid each item on the kitchen table in a grid, as though organization is a form of understanding.
It is not.
The box is empty now. You put your hand inside it and feel the grain. There is a rough patch in one corner where something was glued and removed. You do not know what. You will not know what.
You begin putting the items back. You do not put them back in the order you found them, because you did not record the order you found them in, and this — this — is the first grief that makes you cry. Not the objects. Not the absence. The disorder you have introduced into the only arrangement she left.