The perfume bottle sits on my dresser. My twin sister gave it to me the week she moved to Oregon. It's half empty, still smells exactly like her.
I don't wear it. I just unscrew the cap and hold it under my nose. That one breath takes me back to our shared bedroom, the fights over the mirror, the late-night whispers.
The bookmark is from a bookstore that closed in 2008. We used to go there every Saturday, splitting a cherry Coke at the café. She always marked her page with that same faded red tassel.
I found it between the pages of a cookbook I never use. The bookmark is just paper and string, but it holds the weight of afternoons I thought would never end.
Living alone now, at sixty-one, I've learned that some things you keep not because you need them but because they keep you whole. The bottle, the bookmark, the twin I talk to on the phone every Sunday.
The town is quiet, the clinic patients are the same faces I've seen for thirty years. My hands are steady from scraping plaque, but they tremble a little when I hold that perfume bottle.
I think about the roads we didn't take together. She took the left turn to the coast. I stayed on the straight road through the plains.
The bottle is not a souvenir. It is a presence. A small glass anchor in a house that otherwise holds only me.