Oru kept the list in a small green notebook she did not show to anyone. Nine entries, one per book, each noting what had been taken after the final revision was submitted and the book was no longer hers.
The first book took the particular quality of boredom she had felt as a child lying on the floor of her parents' house on summer afternoons: that specific, suspended, almost sweet version of having nothing to do. She had not been able to feel it since. She had tried, sometimes, lying on the floor of her own apartment, but it was a different floor and she was a different person and the feeling did not come.
The second book took something in how she heard her own name. Not the name itself: she still answered to it, still recognized it. But the small shock of it, the slight strangeness of the sounds that meant her — that was gone. Her name now arrived like any other word.
The third had taken something from late afternoon light. Not all light, and not her ability to see or appreciate beauty in light. Only the particular color of late autumn afternoons, the gold that had once made her feel like she was standing on the edge of something she couldn't name. She could still see the gold. It did not do what it had done.
She had been frightened, after the third, and had not written for four years. Then she wrote again, because she could not not write, and the fourth book took a small but specific fear she had carried about speaking in front of groups of people. After that she was calmer at readings. She stood at the podium and felt nothing but the words.
The fifth took the dream she had had repeatedly since childhood: the one where she was flying, but not like a bird, more like she had forgotten how gravity worked and the correction had not yet arrived. She missed the dream, sometimes, more than she had missed any of the others.
Six: a face. Not the name, not the memory of who the person was or what they had meant to her. Only the precise geometry of a face she had loved at twenty-two and never seen again, which she had carried for decades as a kind of internal photograph. The photograph was gone. She remembered knowing the face. She could not reconstruct it.
Seven, eight, nine. The list continued. She read it sometimes, not with grief exactly, more with the curiosity of a scientist reviewing previous results. She was still herself. She still had most of what she had started with. She was simply, with each book, slightly less the original version of herself and slightly more the accumulated version: someone who had given things and was not the same as someone who hadn't.
The tenth book was nearly finished. She was seventy-two. She sat at her desk in the afternoon light that no longer did what it had done, and she typed the last sentence of the last chapter. She read it. She changed one word. She read it again. She closed the laptop.
She sat very still and waited to discover what was missing this time.