Inventory of a Borrowed Apartment

The kettle whistles in someone else's language. A spoon rests on the counter like a small tongue that has forgotten what it wanted to say. Above the sink, a window holds the rain the way a stranger holds your coat.

I open drawers and find the previous tenant — a hairpin, a receipt from a grocery in a city I cannot pronounce, a button the color of an eye that has watched too much weather.

The radiator clicks its slow alphabet. Pipes hum somewhere behind the wall like a relative trying not to wake me. In the medicine cabinet, an empty bottle still smells faintly of lavender and someone's mother.

I sleep on sheets that remember another body. In the morning, the mirror returns me slightly rearranged — my face arrived, but my name is still in transit, labeled fragile, traveling under another sky.