The Borrowed Sweater

It's been four years. She should return it. She should at least acknowledge she has it, still hanging in the back of her closet like a soft gray ghost, stretched at the cuffs where her hands aren't quite as long as his were. Weren't. Are. She never knows which tense to use for someone who simply stopped calling. The sweater smells like her now—like her laundry detergent, her apartment, the particular combination of coffee and old books that constitutes her life. Whatever traces of him it held have been worn away, wash by wash, year by year. It's become hers through the slow violence of time. But she can't throw it out. Throwing it out would be admitting something finished that never properly started. She wears it on Sundays, when no one visits. It's too big and too warm and exactly right for sitting by the window, watching the street, remembering how easy it is to become part of someone's background. How easy to be borrowed and never returned.