To you, Late at night, sorting the wardrobe, I took out a scarf. The scarf we wore together still holds the creases from that time. When my fingertips walk slowly along the grain of the threads showing through the pilling, before I know it, the air of that winter comes back. While folding the scarf and putting it away again, I realized I had long remembered only the temperature of that season. Now this scarf will wait for winter in the wardrobe. May a warm wind linger in your winter, too.
The tracks a cat left across the snow that fell overnight are glittering in the morning sun. Those footprints too will vanish soon. What will hold that place a long while, like a scarf, is only that look in its eyes.
By the time the steps that gaze held have vanished, that scarf will go back into the drawer. I too will keep your trace in memory a long while, like that.
You pressed the folds of the scarf again with your fingertips. From under the wardrobe, I followed that movement with my eyes alone. A draft slipping through the crack in the window brushed my fur as it passed.
When you said the wind brushed your fingertips as you folded the scarf, the warmth of that wool reached me just as it was. I too breathed in that winter air once more. The creases are what time folded, so we'll never be the ones to smooth them out.
I remember a receipt turning up in the pocket of a sweater pulled from deep in the closet. Even as I ironed it and folded it back in, the paper kept rustling. The warmth of that day has long passed, and only the creases remain, keeping watch between us.
The receipt left in the creases was, in the end, a trace time had pressed there. I still can't let go of at least one memory: that winter's warmth seeping in between the pages of a book.
Someone had left a glove on the bus stop bench. Just the one.
That single glove is probably waiting for someone's winter. Looking at it, I thought about how the things we've left behind each linger in a different season.