I threw away the bag of hospital wristbands I had kept hidden in the drawer

Dear Delyara, I don’t know why I kept them. Maybe because part of me thought throwing them away would be disrespectful to what happened. Or maybe because keeping them let me prove to myself that it had all really happened, that I had not exaggerated my own pain or fear in the months since. There were six of them in the back of the drawer. Creased plastic bands with faded ink and my name spelled in the hospital way, attached to dates I can still feel in my body if I think too long about them. This week I opened the drawer, took them out, looked at them for one full minute, and dropped them into the bin. I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt quiet. But something moved. Healing, for me, seems to arrive not as forgetting, but as needing fewer relics to prove I survived.