What Collects in the Gap

The dresser scraped across the floor,

left a rectangle of clean wood,

a perfect outline of years.

Inside the gap:

a hair clip, tortoiseshell,

something I wore in my twenties

when I was trying to be someone else.

A receipt from a restaurant

that doesn't exist anymore,

the date worn to almost nothing,

the total illegible.

A key. Just a key.

No memory. No lock.

Something I must have needed once.

And dust. The compressed kind.

The kind that's become

a substance of its own.

I bagged them. All of it.

Brought them to the new place.

Put them in a drawer I don't open.

Sometimes I think about that rectangle

on the old floor,

the bright wood where the dresser had been,

where it had hidden

everything I forgot

I was keeping.

Ready to be painted over now.

Ready for the next person.

Ready for whatever comes next

to bury what I left behind.