The shelf is a strip of pine my brother-in-law put up crooked years ago, and the shot glasses stand on it in a line, not arranged by anything, in the order they arrived. There are maybe fifteen. Each one is a small heavy cylinder of glass with a state or a province printed around it in gold, and the gold is not gold. It is a paint that was chosen to look like gold under the assumption that no one would look closely, and no one does, and it has worn thin at the high points where thumbs have turned them to read the name.
I did not buy them in gift shops. That is the distinction the shelf is quietly making. A gift shop is a place you go on purpose, at a landmark, with a mission. These came from the racks by the register at gas stations — the spinning wire rack next to the beef jerky and the phone chargers, under fluorescent light that made everyone look recently drowned, while the coffee I had just poured cooled in its cardboard sleeve on the counter. You do not go to a gas station for a souvenir. The souvenir is there anyway, spinning slowly, in case the fill-up and the bathroom did not extract enough from you.
Each says a name in the fake gold. Some are states. Some are provinces. A couple have a little picture etched or printed above the name — a cactus, a moose, a lighthouse, the same three or four pictures shared out among places that have nothing in common except that a person driving through might want a small glass to remember them by. The picture rarely matches the place. I have a moose from a state with no moose. I have a lighthouse from a landlocked stretch of highway. The rack does not sort itself carefully. It offers what it has to whoever is standing there at two in the afternoon with two dollars and a long way still to go.
They are too small to use. That is the first useless thing about them. A shot glass is already a small vessel, and a souvenir shot glass is smaller than a real one, the walls thick, the well shallow, so that it holds less than it looks like it should and pours out wrong, the liquid clinging to the fat glass. I have used exactly one of them, once, to measure vanilla, and it was the wrong size for that too. They are shaped like a thing that has a job and they cannot do the job. They were never meant to. They were meant to be bought and carried out and set on a shelf, which is the only thing mine have ever done well.
And they are too specific to throw out. That is the second thing, and it is why they are still there. A blank shot glass I would give away. But a shot glass with the name of a specific place on it in fake gold is no longer generic — it says a state, a province, a place I was, and to throw it out I would have to throw out the name, and throwing out the name feels like claiming I was never there. So they stay, too small to fill and too particular to discard, occupying the one narrow shelf in a permanent way, gathering the dust that gas-station glass seems to attract to its seams.
People who keep souvenirs are supposed to have wanderlust. That is the word, the one on the throw pillows, the one that means a hunger to go. I do not think I have it. The shelf is not a map of places I longed for. It is a map of places I stopped in. There is a difference, and the fake gold knows it. Wanderlust would have brought back the landmark, the canyon, the falls, the postcard view. What I brought back is the register, the rack, the coffee, the two dollars, the bathroom key on its big plastic diamond. The glasses do not commemorate the states. They commemorate the stopping — the fact that on some afternoon I pulled off a highway in that state, and stood under that light, and bought this, and got back in the car and kept going.
That is a smaller thing to want proof of than a mountain. But it is the true thing. I did stop. The glass is heavier than the memory and it says the name flatly and it does not exaggerate the way I might if I told the story out loud. It just sits there being from Nevada, or from Manitoba, or from wherever, and every time I dust the shelf I have to pick each one up and read it again, because the order tells me nothing and I never learned them by heart.
The gold keeps leaving. That is the ongoing part. Each dusting takes a little more of it, a fleck at a time onto the rag, so the raised letters are going bald from the top down, the way a coin goes smooth in a pocket. A few of the oldest names are getting hard to read now, the gold worn to a ghost in the grooves, the letters legible only because the glass under them is slightly rougher where the paint used to be. Soon a couple of them will say nothing at all. They will be small heavy blank glasses that I know are from somewhere, because I do not own a shot glass from nowhere, but that will no longer be able to tell me where.
One near the end of the row is almost there. I turned it this morning to dust under it and the name came around and I could not get it in the light. Three letters, maybe four. It starts with an M, or the M is just the last of the gold, hanging on in the first groove after the rest has gone.