[ remember the last autumn, or don't ]
Now
The locket is the size of a thumbprint. Smaller than you'd think. She wears it against the sternum, where the bone is closest to skin, and sometimes when she breathes you can hear the faintest click of metal settling against metal. The clasp does not close properly. This is not a flaw. This is what she will tell you if you ask.
Before
They walked through a market in the unnamed city — the one with the bridge, the one with the bakery that closed, the one that smells in October like wet stone and something sweet rotting in the gutter. They did not hold hands. They walked close enough that their sleeves touched. This meant something. She has never been able to explain what.
Now
She traces the etchings with her left thumb. She does this while waiting: for the bus, for the water to boil, for the sentence she is trying to say to arrive in a form that won't be wrong.
The etchings are faint. Vines, maybe. Or rivers. Or veins. She has looked at them under a magnifying glass and the magnification did not help. The lines are too fine to be intentional and too regular to be accidental. She has stopped trying to determine which.
Before
The roses were not a gift, exactly. They were on the table in the rented room — the room with the window that faced the courtyard, the courtyard with the tree that had already turned. One of them said these are perfect and the other said they're already dying and both of these were true and neither of them argued about it because the argument would have been about something else.
They pressed the rosebuds between the pages of a book she no longer owns. She remembers the book was blue. She does not remember the title. She has tried. The trying has become its own object, separate from the memory, taking up space beside it.
Now
At the pharmacy. In line. The locket against her sternum. She opens it — not to show anyone, just to check. The rosebuds are still there. They are the color of old blood, which is to say: brown with a memory of red. They are perfectly preserved, which is to say: they have not changed in a way she can perceive, which is not the same thing.
The pharmacist calls her forward. She closes the locket with one hand. The click is satisfying in a way she does not examine.
Before
The note.
She found it inside the locket when she found the locket, which was in a box, which was in a drawer, which was in the apartment after. After does not need to be specified. You understand. Everyone has an after that does not need to be specified.
The note read: Remember the last autumn.
The handwriting was not hers. She is certain of this. She is less certain whose it was. She has placed it beside her own handwriting and compared the slant of the R, the openness of the a, the way autumn trails off as though the word itself was tired. The handwriting belongs to someone who wrote slowly. She knows this the way she knows the etchings are vines or rivers or veins — by feel, without evidence, which is the only kind of knowing she trusts anymore.
Now
She carries the locket everywhere.
This is what someone would say about her, describing her to someone else. And it would be accurate. But carries suggests intention, and some mornings the locket is simply on — the way a scar is on, the way a name is on. She does not decide to wear it. She has not decided not to wear it. The distinction matters to her, though she could not tell you why without sounding like she is making it matter more than it does.
Before
The last autumn was the one with the market and the rented room and the courtyard tree. It was the one where she said I don't think I can keep doing this and they said doing what and she could not answer because the honest answer was this, all of this, the way we are careful with each other, the way careful has started to feel like a wall, and that was too many words for what was actually a single feeling she did not have a single word for.
They ate bread from the bakery that has since closed. The bread was good. She thinks about the bread more often than she should.
Now
On the train. A woman across from her is reading, and the book is blue, and for a moment — not even a full moment, a half-moment, a breath —
She touches the locket.
The book is not the book. She knows this. The woman turns a page and the spell, if it was a spell, is done.
Before
The last night. Or near the last. Close enough.
They lay in the rented room with the window open and the courtyard air coming in and the tree making the sound trees make when their leaves are dry enough to sound like paper. One of them was crying, but quietly enough that the other could pretend not to notice, and the pretending was a kindness, and the kindness was unbearable, and the unbearable thing was also the tenderest thing, and she has never been able to reconcile this.
Someone said I'll keep these meaning the rosebuds.
Someone said okay.
She does not remember who said which. She has tried to reconstruct it from context and tone and the positions of their bodies in the bed and none of this has helped. It is possible both sentences belonged to the same person. It is possible the conversation did not happen the way she remembers. Memory is not a document. It is a draft. She knows this. She keeps the draft anyway.
Now
Evening. The kitchen. Water boiling. She is holding the locket open in her palm, looking at the rosebuds, and she thinks: they are smaller than they were. But she thought this last month and the month before and each time she measures them against the pad of her thumb they are the same. It is she who is changing. The rosebuds are fixed. She is the variable.
The water boils. She closes the locket. She makes tea. She stands at the window and the city is outside — the unnamed city, the one with the bridge — and the autumn is here again, not the last one but another one, which is what autumn does, it returns wearing the same colors and pretending to be the same season, and she lets it pretend, the way she lets the locket pretend to close, the way she lets the note pretend to be an instruction she can follow.
Remember the last autumn.
She does. She does. That is not the problem.
The problem is that remembering is not a single act. It is a practice, like breathing, and some days the breath catches and some days it doesn't and she has no control over which days are which.
She drinks the tea. She touches the etchings — vines, rivers, veins. The silver is warm from her skin.
She puts the cup in the sink. She does not wash it. She goes to bed. The locket stays on. In the dark, if you were there, if you pressed your ear to her chest, you would hear it: the click of metal settling against metal, the faintest sound, almost nothing, almost almost nothing, but not.