What We Keep

The last time I saw Sarah, her hair was falling out in clutches. We sat on her bathroom floor, me gathering the strands like they were precious things, her laughing through tears that kept smudging her mascara downward. That was three months ago.

Now I'm standing in her apartment, a box in my arms, watching her boyfriend load the last of her things into a van. The apartment echoes—empty shelves, dust patterns where pictures hung. In the corner, the goldfish bowl catches light, casting watery shadows across the wall. The fish, a comet she won at a carnival five years ago, swims in slow circles.

"You should take him," Marcus says, nodding at the bowl. "She can't have pets at the facility."

"I'll think about it," I say. What I mean is no. I already have the dog—Sarah's dog, actually, though they'd gotten it together, back when together meant something different. The dog follows me everywhere now, its nails clicking on the hardwood, a constant reminder that she's not coming back.

The vitamins on the counter—her morning regiment, organized in one of those plastic cases with compartments—glint in the afternoon light. Vitamin D for the bones she never strengthened, B-complex for energy she didn't have, iron supplements that didn't help. She swallowed them every day with religious precision, like if she could just control this one thing, everything else would fall into place. Some things you can't supplement your way out of.

"You're a good friend," Marcus says, and the word hangs there, heavy and wrong. Friend. What we are now, after the terminal diagnosis and the morphine and the way she stopped calling me because she didn't want me to see her like that. What we are after I signed the DNR order she begged me to sign, then changed her mind about three times.

I drive home with the dog in the passenger seat, its head out the window, ears streaming in the wind. The goldfish bowl sloshes on the floorboards. I pull into my driveway and sit for a long time, watching the sun dip below the horizon, thinking about how we measure a life. In hair lost. In vitamins swallowed. In pets that outlive us. In friends who stay until they can't anymore.

The dog whines, impatient. I grab the bowl and head inside, letting the door click shut behind me.