May 26, 2026

object impermanence

Oh, how I miss the striped tank top in that picture of us at the Amherst Farmer’s Market in July of 2011. Sometime that visit, we hiked up Sugarloaf Mountain and you made a small chalk drawing of a sunflower on the board outside the bathroom at Cushman’s, put our initials in the petals with a plus sign between them. Later, after I moved in, you took to wearing it, along with the long-sleeve SuperDry flannel I’d had on the second time we met in New York City, dinner on the Upper East Side on that very hot night. I’d ordered a cucumber gimlet. That was my drink that summer. You were already so tan, your face shiny from humidity. My uncle had died just a few days before, and I was staying at the apartment he’d live in his entire adult life. I found a shell collection I didn’t know he had under the bed and the Zippy the Pinhead comics I always read when I was visiting as a kid. He had so many records, all those art books. Glass jars filled with plastic grasshoppers. Magnetic metal ants on the fridge. Chicken schmaltz in the freezer. I met many of his friends for the first time at his funeral, and during those few days of Shiva, which made me think about how my version of him was maybe like his version of me, which is to say I wish I’d known him better than I did. Maybe that’s the reason I kept the last pack of cigarettes he’d left before going to the hospital and his address book and the stack of business cards of people he’d met through his job at the Federal Reserve and a pen in the shape of Cleopatra that had lost its ink. Just now, I put it out on a table at the foot of our lawn, along with a pack of playing cards with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on the back and a puzzle I will never do again. There’s a handful of Mason jars there, too, and a set of embroidered washcloths, and a game called “Judgy Fish” that looked like it would be fun than it was. There’s a desk chair that’s seen better days, and a plastic Christmas tree and two wooden frames and a few scoopfuls of loose Legos. Everything free, free, free. Someone’s already come by for the oars and Fiona from next door found a pair of earrings she liked. Maybe they’ll become a good luck charm, like that old tank top we wore thread-thin almost 15 years ago. Look how we still reminisce, touching our shoulders where the straps once were.