She labeled every box. KITCHEN in blue marker, BEDROOM in green, BOOKS in black. The movers stacked them in the right rooms. By evening the apartment was unpacked, dishes in cabinets, clothes hung, books shelved. She stood in the living room and turned slowly. Everything was where it should be.
For a week her left hand reached for the light switch on the wrong side of the bathroom door. She'd stand in the dark for half a second, fingers brushing bare wall, then reach across to the right. She never thought about it. Just the small correction, each time.
The coffee mugs were above the stove now instead of beside the sink. She'd open the wrong cabinet, see plates, close it, open the right one. Her roommate from college had kept mugs beside the sink. That was eleven years ago. The habit had outlived three apartments.
By March the corrections stopped. She walked through the kitchen in the dark and her hand found every handle. The old apartment was gone—not from memory, she could still picture it, the yellow tile, the window over the fire escape—but from her hands. Her hands had forgotten it completely.
She didn't notice when the forgetting finished. There was no last wrong reach. It just stopped, somewhere in the ordinary days, and she never knew which one.