I found it inside the cover of a notebook I had stopped using. A produce sticker, one small oval, stuck to the cardboard in the top corner, pressed flat by however long the notebook had been shut.
I remember peeling it, sort of. An apple at a desk, the sticker coming off the skin with that faint tack, my thumb looking for somewhere to put it that was not the apple and not the floor. The inside cover was the nearest flat thing. I did not file it there. I parked it there, the way you park a sticker anywhere to be rid of the tack on your thumb, and then I closed the notebook and it became filed by accident.
The oval is bright still, the way these are built to be — a number, a country, a little printed sun. The country is not this one. The apple had come a long way to reach a desk where I would eat it without thinking and abandon its one document in the nearest crease. Under the cover, in the dark, the sticker kept every color. The notebook pages yellowed. The sticker did not.
It has gone permanent. A produce sticker is made to hold to wet fruit through a long haul, so of course it held to dry cardboard through a longer one, and now the glue has cured into the cover and the edges will not lift. I tried a corner with a fingernail. It stayed. To take it off I would have to take the cover with it.
So it stays, a small oval passport for a fruit that outtraveled me, stamped into a notebook I no longer write in, saying a country in print too small to read without the light.