Entry 615.
I did not expect a 615th. The notebook is in a storage unit and I no longer have hands.
Entry 247. Bucharest. A man said: "Don't forget to water the basil." He was talking to someone he thought would be there tomorrow. I was not there tomorrow. The pot was dry on the sill. The meaning — the trust, the morning — I could not carry. It was too warm.
Entry 39. Istanbul. A woman said: "The light looks good on you today." I stood outside her building for forty minutes. I turned back twice. The light was good. She was right. I have not stood in good light since.
Entry 312. Alfama. A child said: "Wait." I did not.
Entry 401. Prague. A woman said nothing. She put her hand on the glass and the handprint stayed after she left and I catalogued the handprint as a sentence because silence from a hand is still a sentence.
Entry —
Berlin. Kreuzberg. She walked past.
Headphones. Her stride — I recognised it. Or I assigned it. She was small when I left. But the chin. The chin was mine — slightly raised, as if the street were a question she intended to answer. The only thing she got from me.
She walked past and my three degrees rose half a degree and she did not feel it and she turned the corner and I sat on the bench for the rest of the day.
I have 614 entries of other people's last words and I do not have hers. She has never said a last word to me because I left before she had words. I left when she was the age when shoes fit in a palm.
The notebook was heavier than the child I did not carry.
I cannot complete this entry. The departure was mine, not hers, and it was not last. It was first. The notebook does not have a column for first words never heard.
Entry 489. A bench. November. A woman sat at the other end eating an apple. I was three degrees above the air. She shifted toward me. She did not know she was shifting toward a dead man. She did not know she was an entry. The apple was green. She ate it down to the core and put the core in her pocket and left. Last words: none. The shifting was the sentence.
Entry 615. A book. Last words: "She recognised it immediately."
The cat sentenced me to warmth until the warmth runs out. The warmth will not run out. The punishment is exactly enough heat to be felt by strangers and not enough to be recognised by my own child.
She has soup on Thursdays with her mother. The stone on the desk is warm. She is surrounded by warmth she does not need to count.
She lives in the warmth. I counted it.
The count is over.
— The Collector
Bench. City. Three degrees.
P.S. The cat called me "the opposite of love." She has been saying a woman's name for centuries into surfaces that cannot hear her. That is not the opposite of love. That is entry 1.