Grel had been building her archive for three months. This was slow for a curator of her experience. She was aware of the reasons and had decided not to examine them too carefully.
The archive contained: thirty-one years of professional notes, correspondence, audio records from the eleven years when she had kept them, photographs going back to her twenties, and a supplementary document she had written last spring and titled "What I Held Back from Other People's Files." This last item she had marked private and would decide about later.
She had flagged the year 1993.
In 1993 she was thirty-six and living alone in a rented room above a tailor's shop in a coastal city whose name she had not thought about in years. She had left her marriage four months earlier, amicably enough that there was nothing much to document. She had not yet understood what she wanted to do with her life. At the time it had felt mostly like waiting.
She had not kept records that year. This was the problem. The rest of the archive was thick, the decades before and after filled with notes, letters, dated receipts of experience. The year 1993 was almost nothing: a lease agreement, two postcards to her sister, a notebook with twelve entries, most of them about weather. Gaps you could feel the outline of if you knew where to press.
She could write the year now, retroactively. She remembered it clearly. She knew the specific texture of the apartment: the slanted window, the afternoon light, the way the stairs creaked on the third step. She knew the period in March when she had started reading philosophy and the period in October when she had stopped. She knew what she had been moving toward, in the diffuse way you know such things when you are in the middle of moving toward something and cannot yet see it from the outside.
The question she kept arriving at: whether to put herself into the record, or leave the gap as its own kind of evidence.
Her colleague came in to return a file. He had been careful, these past weeks, not to ask about the progress of her own archive, and she appreciated this. After he left she opened the folder labeled 1993.
The pages had dates printed at the top. Below the dates: blank. She counted the entries she had, twelve, and then counted the days without them. There were 353.
She picked up a pen. She put it down. She picked up the folder and held it for a moment, feeling its weight, which was the weight of the paper and nothing else. She put it back in the stack.