Because “declutter a drawer” was part of Finch’s spring cleaning challenge today, I asked him which drawer and he said “the drawer next to the kitchen sink” which I had been filling it up with random things ever since I moved in before he moved in and we never quite organized it so when he went to his Saturday afternoon ballet class, I procrastinated and readied myself to dive into the mess of that drawer — full of ribbons/string from produce or whatever else and random tools too small to be stored in the closet and mini food gift bags and a ruler and the bag clips — and I pulled everything out and spilling all it onto the limited space of the kitchen counter where I only had prepared our breakfast green smoothie hours before and I separated it into like things, but when I got to the rubber bands, it was the thing that was found in every nook and cranny, the red, beige, blue, and black ones scattered in between pens, clips, safety pins, paperclips, screwdrivers, penknife and most were still usable and a few had dried and broke and stuck to whatever it was next to and at that moment, my memory of going through the business of a woman’s life someone who I had met once and never met again — the piles and piles of bills bundled with rubber bands with a copy of the check, the original slip, in the original envelope and the exhaustion that fell into me as I went through them as I wondered why she did this, but more than anything that I wasn’t supposed to be here and the papers felt like they were choking me every time, like they would fly up and cut my neck but he assured me that he needed me there more than anything standing in the foyer of a childhood home that he once knew and could not recognize anymore. He told me that the black ones in the drawer never break and I bundled them carefully back into their original bag, sealing them so that they wouldn’t ever spill again.