Seventeen Lanterns

The morning Elise decided to leave the city, she found a paper lantern on her fire escape. It was the color of apricots, its wire frame bent but intact, and inside, written on a strip of rice paper, were six words in a handwriting she didn't recognize: You were always the brave one.

She held it for a long time. The neighborhood below her stirred the way it always did — the bakery door banging open, the woman in 4B calling her cat, the delivery truck reversing with its endless, patient beeping. These were the sounds that had been the architecture of her mornings for seven years. She was surprised by how clearly she could hear them now that she'd decided to stop listening.

The apartment was nearly bare. She'd given the couch to Marcus downstairs, the bookshelf to the couple on the third floor who were always arguing about shelf space. The books themselves she'd sorted into three piles: keep, release, and the hardest category — not yet. The not-yet pile was the tallest.

Her mother called at noon. "You know you can always come home," she said, which was her way of saying please come home, which was her way of saying I don't understand why you need to go somewhere nobody knows your name.

"I know, Mom," Elise said. She held the lantern up to the window. The light moved through it and turned the room briefly gold. "That's sort of the point."

By evening, seventeen more lanterns had appeared. They lined the fire escape railing, crowded around her doormat, hung from the rusted ladder that led to the roof. Each one a different color. Each one containing a strip of paper. She opened them one at a time, the way you unwrap something you already know is fragile.

Remember the rainstorm on Division Street.

You taught me what sourdough needs.

The world is large. Come back different.

She never found out who made them. Years later, in a kitchen that smelled of cedar and rain, in a town whose name she'd had to learn to pronounce, she would keep the seventeenth lantern on a shelf by the window. Visitors would ask about it. She'd tell them it was a gift from a life she used to live.

She would say this without sadness. Some doors, she'd learned, close the way lanterns light — gently, and only so the brightness has somewhere to gather.