Midnight Collector

This story was first published in the Manila Times’ Sunday Times literary section.

Yes, I am a collector. I collect coins. And stamps. And knives. And books. I gather the mementos of other lives lived separate from mine. I take each treasure in hand and trace my fingertips over every bump and groove, for I must remember how each of these things feels to my living hand.

I relish the paper cuts, the cuts from the keen blade edges. I relish the temporary intaglio of coins pressed to my palms. I relish the smells of book paper and dried ink, the scent of chamomile oil and forge-fire lingering on the steel of the unsheathed cutting edge. I immerse myself in the wordless stories of each of these things I gather to mark those private moments when I collect the shards of myself to put them back together after the world shatters them.

When I am no longer even a memory, these things will outlast me. When they, too, are dust, we will finally be inseparable, as we were once, when we were all part of a whole thing that has since been forgotten as I will be in the erasure of time’s plodding.

The world needs to forget, to make room for those things that insist upon being remembered, if only for the time they exist, and shortly after they cease to be. Some things just must be consumed by midnight like a snack before they can come back. Revenants never stay gone for very long. But they never come back the same, either.

Now I begin a new collection, before my shadow fades into the intrepid darkness, never to return: I open a fresh new box in which I place the faces I’ve collected. They are clean now, free of sinew and bone. So are the knives, though the flensing and fillet blades will always carry the scent of blood and microscopic nicks from unfortunate jawbones. My hands tremble when I touch my treasures, you see.

I am collecting faces, for when I lose my own.