Posted from the bus on the way back up to Ithaca.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket. The bus was quiet. 3 A.M to Buffalo. Everyone was asleep save an older man with a newspaper in the back of the bus and the pretty girl with the laptop behind me.

We cruised across the pavement, a cough here, a grunt there, all drowned in the white noise of the air conditioning.

There it was. On the phone. My feet, her feet. A picture I took three years ago. Maybe I forgot to delete it with all the others. No faces, just our lower legs, my shoes, and her sandals at one end of a hammock. I would never know why it popped up. Maybe I had shifted in my sleep and hit a button. It didn’t matter.

I took two seconds to look over the image, and then deleted it. I needed to know that the world was going to forget about her before I could let go. I wanted to be the last person ever to think about her, but I wanted to stop thinking. Cancer had done his dirty work over two years ago, and with that last picture gone, I was hoping her memory was going to disappear as fast as she had.

Originally on Ficly: http://ficly.com/stories/20843