In elementary school, I learned how to knit in a closet-like room every weekend with five or six other girls. On the first day, I grabbed a corner of the space for myself, wedged between the door and the wall, as the others sat shoulder to shoulder around a low wooden table. A large window let in a square of white sunlight that roamed over our hands. Our teachers loomed behind us. I remember them as pale shadows, smelling faintly of dried peppers and cooking oil.

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Suspended, a thin stroke of railroad splits the cityscape. From the right, a train cuts across the sky, purple light blinking through each window. No stars, no clouds, nowhere else to look. Sitting here, stuck between an overly cautious minivan and a looming semi, as my lungs fill with fumes and the dry air of late February, for a few moments all I feel is bliss.

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Here's to a year of disjointed memories. I can hardly contain myself — moments slip out of my mind as easily as they enter it, which makes writing in retrospect more of an exercise in embellishment and storytelling than a record of truth and certainty. I am my most unreliable narrator. What happened in 2017? You can trust me to forget about it.

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