The Jar of Endings
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She kept the pebbles in a jar that once held olives. Each one she'd found in a place where something had ended—a parking lot where a building was demolished, the shore after a storm, her mother's driveway the morning after the funeral. They were all roughly the same size, though she hadn't chosen them that way. The jar sat on her windowsill and in certain light, she could almost convince herself they were eggs, waiting. When she'd felt close enough to hold the jar, she hadn't taken it out of the window.
She remembered small things, the carpet staining the underside of her wedding ring if she drank red wine, how earwax felt she would touch it, wipe her fingers on napkins to see, how to unscrew a vacuum cleaner, the idiosyncratic way she ate pie with two forks, how men's hair felt when it was freshly cut and fancy; mornings in France, afternoons on her knees in front of glass cloches. She remembered Adam's cigarettes, their thin white case in her pocket as they climbed to the Uinta Mountains at dusk. She remembered the first glance they'd given each other, during the procession that had opened her mother's funeral. She remembered the packing tape holding the lid shut on her mother's urn.
She remembered hearing everything once and everything twice. She remembered not knowing whether she believed it when a boy said the track of a toad crossing poison oak looked like fingers. She remembered her first radio station, the weight of how much she liked someone. She remembered both her godmothers, both of her grandmothers, and how many Real Macaws there had been. She thought she remembered her breath, and her words.
She remembered visiting Paris with Janet, Janet very pregnant that first summer, Adam's tuition paid in full, and she'd felt less like her mother afterward, but more than a stranger: the weight of another person's life, a child with Adam's eyes, how much she'd been doing laundry, how she didn't want that person to come of age (not yet). Since then she'd held on to fragments of Janet's story, until hearing her speak was like reading a mirror. Stripping a spool, her mother sealing drafts under tape, her mother putting leftovers in KitchenAid-sized tupperware, though her mother had always been a biter, not a baker, always eating anywhere she could, saving anything she could.
Some things she hadn't thought about for years, etched into her memory, but emptying enough to fill her life, still here, to continue, as if she snuck into a place she'd already lived and there it was, ready for her to rebuild, as if the parts weren't separate. They were half of her. Circumstance, next to what she didn't know was a circumstance, was part of what she knew, and history unto itself.
Each world had another world, not the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title