Inventory of a Borrowed Coat

In the left pocket, a ticket stub gone soft as a moth's wing, the ink of some city dissolved into the gray weather of cloth.

I did not buy this coat. It arrived around my shoulders like a stranger's afternoon, still warm with another's walking, the collar holding a faint argument of rain.

There is a button missing where a button used to insist on itself, and the thread that held it curls now like a question nobody remembered to finish.

I keep my hands in someone else's warmth. I carry the small change of a life I never spent — a key to no door, a folded list of errands the dead were good enough to leave undone.

When I give the coat away it will be heavier by one winter, one more set of fingerprints pressed into the lining like seeds waiting for the next cold body to bloom.