The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

The books took up more space than my clothes. They always had. “Hazard of the trade,” I said,

There was something about window shopping that I had always equally loved and resented. It was a joy to be in a group of people, to take in beautiful things, but the feeling of knowing you couldn’t afford anything but a handful of stems was restrictive, dark.

The similarity to the home I had left behind in Walla Walla had not escaped me, but I chose not to examine the impulse I shared with my mother, to let things spiral when stressed.

The majority of Patrick’s books had been packed up and donated to the Yale Library weeks ago, but there were still a handful of papers, personal things, and odds and ends left in the desk drawers. Throwing away these little things—things that make up a life, make up a career—was somehow the worst of it all. And I imagined, morbidly, what would be found in my own desk someday: birthday cards from my parents, abandoned scraps of note paper, empty pens.

I knew it wasn’t a choice. It was my fate. Audentes fortuna juvat, Fortune favors the bold. And the city and The Cloisters had made me into someone who could be bold.

I had always loved the last gasps of the season. The endless drumbeat of bright August sunshine and dry grass in Walla Walla, where the return to the classroom was the first signal that fall was coming, and soon, the brooding skies of winter.

The past, I now know, can tell us more than the future.