The Catalogue
Flash fiction by Mei, Feb 12, 2026
She keeps a list of everything she has lost.
Not in the way of grief: not a shrine, not candles and photographs pinned to cork. More like an inventory. Clinical. The handwriting is neat. She uses a ruler for the margins.
Item 7: The sound of my mother's laugh. Not the fact of it. She remembers that her mother laughed easily, head tipped back, hand on her own chest as if holding something in. She remembers knowing this. She does not remember the sound.
Item 12: The name of the street where I first kissed someone. She remembers the kiss. Clumsy. His mouth tasted of orange Fanta and confidence. She remembers a streetlight buzzing above them like an insect deciding whether to land. She cannot remember if the street had a name or if it was one of those new-build cul-de-sacs that get designated rather than named. She has tried searching for it. The estate has been demolished.
Item 23: Whether I was happy in June. The whole month. She has photographs: a barbecue, a sunburned shoulder, herself squinting into a camera someone else was holding. She looks happy. But looking happy and being happy are not the same thing. She knows this because she is very good at looking happy. June might have been wonderful. She has no way to verify.
Item 31: The argument. She knows there was one. She knows it mattered. She knows it ended something: a friendship, maybe, or only the version of the friendship where they were honest with each other. She cannot remember what was said. She has reconstructed it from context clues: a cancelled dinner, an email she never replied to, a Christmas card signed with only a first name where there used to be a first name and a kiss. She is not sure her reconstruction is accurate. She suspects she has cast herself in a kinder light than the evidence supports.
Item 34: What I was going to say. She was going to say something. She's sure of it. She opened her mouth and the thought was there, fully formed, important, the kind of thing you only think of once. Then someone interrupted, or the kettle boiled, or she lost her nerve. The shape of the thought remains. An impression in the cushion after the person has stood up. She can feel where it was. She cannot feel what it was.
She adds to the list most evenings. Not from sadness. From discipline.
The things she remembers need no record. They persist on their own, turning up uninvited at 2am or in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely. The things she remembers are loud and self-sufficient and do not need her help.
It's the quiet ones she worries about. The ones that slip out through the gaps between days. If she doesn't write them down, if she doesn't at least record the shape of what's gone, then they were never there at all. And she cannot bear the thought that something real happened to her and left no trace.
So she keeps the list. Not because it brings anything back. It doesn't. The list is not a resurrection; it's a headstone. A way of saying: this existed. I know because I noted its absence.
The list is getting longer. She is not sure whether this means she is losing more, or only that she is getting better at noticing.
She suspects the second. She hopes for the first.
Because if she's losing things faster, at least the things were real. And if she's only getting better at noticing, then the losses were always there: an invisible haemorrhage she's only just learned to see. Which means everything she thought she had was already partly gone.
She picks up the pen.
Item 47: The feeling I had when I started this list.
She remembers starting it. She remembers the notebook was new and the pen was blue. She does not remember why she started it. There must have been a reason: a specific loss, a specific evening, a specific moment when she thought I should write this down. But the origin story of the catalogue is itself an entry in the catalogue.
She finds this funny. Not in a way that makes her laugh.
She closes the notebook. She puts it in the drawer. She will open it again tomorrow, because tomorrow there will be something new to record: some small, specific absence she'll catch mid-flight, like a moth between her palms.
The list cannot save anything. She knows this.
She keeps it anyway.