The Ordinary Drawer

In the kitchen drawer: thirty-seven take-out menus,

each one soft from handling, worn at the folds.

Same three restaurants for thirty years—

the Chinese place on Fifth, the pizza joint

two blocks down, the deli that closed in 2015

but still lived in her drawer anyway.

I know what this means. I know the menu

by heart because I've ordered from these places too,

same taste, same laziness, same refusal

to cook on certain nights.

The menus smelled like the inside of the drawer—

cardboard and dust and something faintly floral

from a sachet wedged in the corner.

I held them to my face like I could smell her,

like the drawer had preserved something beyond

paper and ink.

Thirty-seven menus. I started to count

and then stopped. The number didn't matter.

What mattered was that she kept them,

that she'd ordered from the same three places

so many times the menus had become soft as cloth,

that her hands had opened this drawer

thousands of times and reached for the same routine.

My aunt wanted to throw everything away,

to clean the apartment like evidence,

like the proof of a life was clutter.

But I wanted to keep the menus, at least a while,

to understand what her ordinary looked like,

what her nights felt like, what she reached for

when she didn't have the energy to cook.

I folded them carefully and put them in a box.

I'll probably never order from those places again.

But for now I keep them.

Proof that she lived here, that she had habits,

that she was someone who ordered from the same places,

whose hands knew the way to this drawer,

whose life, from the outside,

looked like nothing much at all.