YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars.
You think you need all of it.
Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.
I love her, but there is no going back. No bonfires on the beach. No mouths pressed together. No hungry fumblings. No fingers through her hair. But maybe I can go further back, to a less complicated time when cute was an accurate description of my grandfather and Mabel was simply my best friend.