He found a photograph of a woman he didn’t know tucked inside a book he didn’t remember buying.
The woman stood by a river, hair pinned in a style decades out of fashion, eyes fixed on the lens as if she recognized him. On the back, in careful pencil: For when you forget again.
He laughed, unsettled, and shelved the book. That night he dreamed of cold water and the weight of keys in his pocket. He woke with the taste of rust and the certainty he had failed someone.
Over days, the photograph began appearing elsewhere: between bills, beneath his keyboard, inside his coat. Each time, the woman seemed closer, the river higher, the look in her eyes more urgent. New words surfaced on the back, faint but legible. You promised. Then: Come back.
He searched the book at last. It was a memoir, written in his hand, cataloging a life he did not recognize—marriage, arguments, a house by a river. The final chapter ended mid-sentence, ink blurred as if by water.
At dusk he followed the pull of the photograph to the old bridge outside town. The river swelled below, brown and patient. Memory rushed in: her laughter, the argument, the car slipping, his hands letting go.
The woman waited at the railing, exactly as in the photograph, older now, eyes softer. She held out a book.
“Ready?” she asked.
He took it, feeling the weight of keys return, and stepped into the dark, grateful to forget nothing.
Therapy Bits 
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