The Collector of Unlived Lives
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
In the third drawer of her desk, beneath expired passports and ticket stubs to cities she couldn't remember visiting, Elena kept the fragments. Not photographs exactly - she never dared take actual pictures. Instead: a child's blue marble taped to a slip of paper dated "03/17/19 - his eyes." A pressed dandelion labeled "the last one she ever picked." A torn corner of a diner receipt with a phone number circled three times and no name.
She had rules for collecting them. The encounter had to last less than thirty seconds. There had to be that specific lurch in her chest, like missing a step in the dark. And most importantly, she had to be absolutely certain she had never seen them before in her life.
Tonight she was adding a new one: a single silver cufflink shaped like a tiny compass, found on the bus seat beside her. It was still warm from someone's pocket. On the paper she wrote "always knew you'd come back this way" and then crossed it out three times before writing instead just "north." She always ended up writing something ridiculous.
The bus had been nearly empty except for an elderly woman knitting something yellow and shapeless and a teenager whose earbuds leaked tinny music that sounded like crying. Elena had noticed the cufflink when she'd reached for her fallen scarf, its silver catching the streetlights in a pattern that made her teeth hurt. The lurch had come immediately afterward, accompanied by a rush of memories that couldn't possibly belong to her: learning to parallel park in a thunderstorm, the taste of someone else's laughter in her mouth, the exact way bathroom tiles feel against bare knees at 3 AM when you're terrified you're dying but too embarrassed to wake anyone.
These were her last thoughts before she realized she couldn't remember her own phone number.
It happened that fast sometimes.
She had a system for this too, laminated instructions taped to her bathroom mirror:
1. Don't panic. This has happened before.
2. Check the blue notebook in the nightstand.
3. Call the number labeled "Samaritan." He won't remember you either, but he'll know what to do.
4. Whatever you do, DO NOT look through the fragments to try to remember.
But the notebook wasn't where it should be, and the nightstand drawer held only a broken hair clip and a receipt for three coffees dated tomorrow. Tomorrow, with tomorrow's date, printed clearly in yesterday's ink.
Outside her window, the city rearranged itself while she watched. The bakery on the corner became a locksmith's shop, then a place that sold only purple things, then both simultaneously. The streetlights flickered through colors she didn't have names for. In the apartment across from hers, a woman she had seen every day for years (or had it only been days? Or decades?) was looking back at her with Elena's own face.
She reached for the cufflink instead of the phone. Against her palm, the compass needle spun wildly, pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. The fragments in her desk drawer began to hum like tuning forks.
Somewhere in the city, someone felt a sudden, inexplicable grief for English country gardens they'd never seen. Someone else forgot their own name but remembered how to say "I forgive you" in twelve extinct languages.
Elena walked to the window and pressed her forehead against the glass. The reflections multiplied endlessly, each version of her holding◆ About the ending
❧ About the title