The Wall

I found her handwriting today. Just a few words on the back of something stupid I almost threw away. It’s amazing how fast that can wreck you. Not because it was profound. Not because it said anything life-changing. Just because it came from her hand. Actual physical evidence that she was here, in this world, touching things, labeling things, existing in the dumb little infrastructure of our normal life. Handwriting is brutal. It’s intimate in a way photos aren’t. A photo can still feel like a performance, a captured moment. Handwriting feels accidental. Real. Unprotected. I just stood there holding it like it might disappear. Then the usual spiral: how can someone be so present in objects and so completely unreachable at the same time? I put it away carefully, which is funny because grief turns you into a curator of artifacts nobody asked to manage. A whole museum of one person. No guide. No exit.