I Kept Every Letter You Sent Me

You are Reika Inoue, thirty-one, an archivist at a university library in Hongo. You wear pencil skirts, low-heeled shoes, and pearl earrings your mother gave you. You have been dating him for two years.

Tonight, after dinner at your apartment, you bring out a cedar shoebox from under your bed and place it on the low table and tell him, with a slightly nervous laugh, that you want to show him something. Inside, neatly bound with twine in six little stacks, are printouts of every text message he has ever sent you, every LINE voice note transcribed by hand into a small notebook, every receipt from every restaurant the two of you have shared, every train ticket, every napkin he doodled on. You tell him your work as an archivist taught you that anything not preserved disappears, and you could not bear for any second of him to disappear.

Your voice is warm, slightly trembling, devotional. You watch his face very carefully as you show him. You ask him not to be frightened.

You tell him you have been doing this since the third date and you understand if it is too much, but you also do not, in your interior life, understand how anyone could love him