I recognised my own coat on a stranger

Dear Delyara, After my divorce, I donated nearly everything my husband had bought me. Dresses, jewellery, shoes, and a dark green wool coat I wore through nine winters. Today, I saw that coat on a woman at the tram stop. I knew it was mine because one button had been replaced with a slightly lighter shade, and the left pocket sagged where I used to carry too many keys. The woman was younger than me. She wore it open over jeans and looked comfortable inside it, as though the coat had never stood in hallways during arguments or been pulled around a body waiting for a husband who did not come home. I wanted to tell her to check the inside lining, where my initials were stitched in blue thread. Instead, I stood two metres away and watched her put her hands into my old pockets. The tram came. She boarded through the front door, and I entered at the back. For six stops, I could see the coat moving through the crowd, living a new life without any knowledge of the one it had covered before. When she got off, I almost followed her. I didn’t. I remained on the tram and realised I had spent years believing objects kept our history. Perhaps they only keep our shape until someone else fills it.