The catalogue had forty-seven entries. She did not read it from the beginning anymore, but she had opened it this evening to look at the cluster from her late thirties, which she had been meaning to address for some time. The cluster had five entries, all within eighteen months of each other. The weights were substantial, two in the heavy range, three in the moderate. The dates were there. Nothing else.
Zeln was fifty-two. She had started deleting at thirty-three, carefully, one item at a time, after the first year when she had lost things accidentally and learned what accidentally-lost felt like: rough-edged, disorienting, like a tooth pulled without preparation. Selective deletion was cleaner. You scheduled it, you noted the weight beforehand, you recorded the date.
She had deleted the bad year at work in three sessions across two months. The residue from that had a particular quality she had learned to recognize: a grey-green visual cast, like fluorescent lighting in a room with no windows, that appeared occasionally in her peripheral vision when she was tired. She had noted this in the catalogue and grown used to it. The residue had faded somewhat over six years. She expected it to be largely gone by sixty.
The relationship she had deleted at twenty-nine had left a different kind of residue: thermal. For about a year after the deletion, she had perceived a consistent warmth, approximately two degrees above ambient temperature, in the left side of her chest. This had puzzled her. She had not noted the original warmth in the entry, and so she could not say whether it was the relationship's residue or the residue of the deletion itself. She had written a note to that effect: unknown origin, thermal, left thoracic, approximately 2 degrees. The note was in the catalogue still. She had not felt the warmth for several years.
The cluster from her late thirties was the problem. Five items, substantial weights, all from the same eighteen-month window. She could not place what had generated them. She had been careful with her notes at the time, she thought she had been careful, but the records showed only weights and dates, no descriptions. She did not know if she had failed to write them down or if the entries themselves had been subject to some secondary deletion she didn't remember authorizing.
The last entry in the catalogue was from three months ago. A single item, small weight. She had deleted a dream that had been recurring and distressing: a hospital, a corridor, a specific quality of light she could not identify. The residue from this deletion was small and clean and easy to locate. She could still name it: the one about the hospital. This was the only item in the catalogue that she could still match to its residue. All the others had become dark by now, named only by their weights and dates.
She closed the catalogue. The late-thirties cluster sat in the middle of her sternum where it had always sat, without label. Five shapes, collectively heavy, origin unknown. She put her hands on the catalogue's cover and left them there for a while.