I found something I missed when I was cleaning everything out. It's small - just a few things bundled together in the back of a drawer I thought I'd cleared: a receipt from a restaurant that doesn't exist anymore, a voicemail I never deleted, the specific smell a jacket had before I gave it away. Small. Dense. Impossible to throw out now that I've found it.

I don't know what it's for anymore, only that it survived every round of clearing. I sat with it for a long time. I couldn't tell you what it means or why it stayed when everything else went. It just did. Something in it resists being organized away. I'm not going to delete it. I'm afraid it's the last real thing I have. Have you found anything like that - something small and inexplicable you kept even when you were trying to keep nothing?