Everything That Fits

The suitcase was a Samsonite, burnt-orange, purchased in 1987 by a woman named Yolanda who believed in buying things that would outlast her. She was right. She had been dead for six years, and here was the suitcase, open on Marta's bed like a mouth.

Marta had until noon.

She started with practicalities because that was how you got through things — not by feeling them but by solving them. Two pairs of jeans. The black dress that worked for interviews, for funerals, for first dates if you wanted to signal that you were serious. Four blouses. Underwear rolled the way her mother had taught her, like little parcels, which was how Yolanda had approached most things in life: with the conviction that neatness was a form of respect.

She did not let herself look at the rest of the apartment yet.

Seven years in this place. The crack in the kitchen ceiling she had watched spread from a hairline to a Y-shape she privately called the river delta. The windowsill where her basil had died three successive springs before finally, triumphantly, coming in one summer, green and almost violent with life. The bathroom tiles she had re-grouted by herself one February weekend, alone, inexplicably happy, listening to Shostakovich.

The movers were taking the furniture. The landlord was keeping the deposit. The basil she had already put on the neighbor's doorstep with a note.

She allowed herself the shelf.

The shelf was the problem. She had known it would be. Books she could digitize, she had already told herself this, had been very reasonable and adult about it for several weeks. But the copy of The Master and Margarita with her father's underlining was not a book she could digitize. The underlines in Bulgakov's magnum opus weren't his thoughts. He had never written notes in margins, never felt he owned books enough to mark them. They were the places where something had made him slow down. She could spend a long time trying to understand a man by where he had slowed down.

She put it in the suitcase.

Her grandmother's amber brooch, which she never wore because she was afraid of losing it, had therefore lost every occasion to wear it. In.

The photograph from the Carpathians, 1994, her mother and father standing in fog with the particular happiness of people who don't know what's coming. Out — it was too large, the frame. She took it out of the frame. In.

Her degree, rolled in its cardboard tube. Out. She hadn't looked at it in four years. If she needed to prove she existed, she would find another way.

The letters.

She sat on the edge of the bed. There were forty-one of them, bundled in a blue elastic band, written between 2009 and 2012 by a man named Nikanor who had believed in letters the way her mother believed in neatness: as a form of respect, or perhaps of proof. I am thinking of you, they all said, in different arrangements of words. I am thinking of you even when I am not thinking of you. Especially then.

She held them. Outside, a bus went past. Someone on the street laughed at something.

Nikanor was married now, in Gdańsk, with a daughter who appeared on his Instagram holding fish she'd caught with an expression of total, unstudied pride. Marta had looked once and not again. But she thought about the daughter sometimes: that expression, the fish, the not-knowing that the world was anything other than a place that rewarded you for effort.

She put the letters in the suitcase.

Then she took them out.

Then she sat for a while.

Then she put them back in, because the truth was that they were not about Nikanor. They were about the person she had been while receiving them: someone who had still believed in being thought of, who had not yet learned to preemptively withdraw, who had read each one at the kitchen table of her previous apartment (smaller, colder, a different city entirely) with a cup of tea going cold beside her because she kept forgetting it was there. She wanted to keep that woman in the world somehow. She seemed worth preserving.

Marta looked at what was left.

There was more than she’d expected. A tin of buttons her mother had saved from worn-out coats — she’d believed buttons outlasted everything, which was perhaps also a philosophy. A small wooden icon she had bought in Kyiv in her twenties, slightly embarrassed by herself, and had never displayed but also never thrown away. A scarf she did not even like, but that smelled, faintly, of a perfume whose name she’d forgotten because the brand had dissolved sometime in the nineties. She picked up each one and set most of them aside. She kept the icon.

The candlesticks — silver, bent slightly, passed from a great-aunt whose name had not survived the family's forgetting — did not fit. She wrapped them in a sweater, tried, but could not close the lid. She sat with that for a moment. Then she unwrapped them, went to the window, and looked at the street. The woman from 4B was walking a dog that was too big for her, being pulled toward something with cheerful, unstoppable conviction.

She put the candlesticks in her coat pockets. Both of them. One in each. She would carry them on her body. The suitcase wasn't everything. That was the thing about a suitcase. It had always only been a container for what you'd already decided to carry; the rest you wore, or you forgot, or you gave away, or it followed you in the way that things did: not in your hands but in the way you paused sometimes for no reason in a room, feeling the shape of something that used to be there.

She zipped it closed.

The Samsonite, burnt-orange, purchased in 1987 by a woman who believed in things that outlasted her.

Marta put on her coat. Patted her pockets. Left.