we are fumbling with the last steps of life, each trying to make the best of things. outside, the bay bridge stands with a wider step across the water, aged with dirt and muck and grime and the remnants of a goldrush. we found gold in the river, at the bottom, amongst the stones, one afternoon, and collected its fragments in the yellow beach bucket that someone else had abandonned. i lost a flipflop in the heaving white water, bent with my attempts to better things that were not mine to better. i baked you a cake and felt like that was the thing i could do, my piece of the puzzle in the road towards eternity. it didn't mean anything. there were five of us, at a table, all of us dealing with the things that we had done. none of us proud, but some prouder than others. we didn't know what to do, and so we did nothing, and held back the light bits of your hair. these are all the pieces of the things i will lose, all the bits of life that have meant something. i am in the process of packing them away, putting them in brown boxes and closing the lids on them, putting them on the high shelves, in the high corners of this room. memories stop to mean anything without context, and their context is going home. what for to do with them then? because they are only half mine, and it doesn't seem fair to demand then to keep them.