I found a lock of hair in a glass case. The label said ‘Believed to be Emily’s’. Not Emily Brontë’s hair. Not a lock of hair. But hair, possibly Emily’s. The uncertainty is the most honest part. I think about the word believed, as if belief could bind the strands of hair to her scalp, as if glass could hold the heat of her breath. I hold it in my mind like a relic, a relic of a relic. Does the history of myself become parallel with the history of the object kept? What is this hinge or bridge that one builds to become the self that is now? I read Charlotte’s letters. I read Gaskell’s biography. I read the footnotes. I wonder how many women have been footnoted out of their own stories?

[Emily writes] She writes: “I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” I wonder if the same is true of objects. If they pass through us, staining the mind, altering the hue of memory. I wonder what Emily would have thought of her life behind glass. I wonder if Wuthering Heights was her own collection — of storms, of silences, of things too wild to hold. She never wanted to be seen, she wanted to vanish into the moor. And yet here she is, pinned like a butterfly. This is the trap: an anterior document, a document created to sustain an image, an image contained in a scene, a scene without a referent. What is occurring in this falling in together, apart, away?

There is a desire to recuperate the forgotten, the abandoned, the fragmentary, the lost but it is a fool’s errand. I am both wild goose and chase. I wonder if collecting is a form of violence or is it a form of love? The human heart has hidden treasures, in silence sealed, in secret kept. Surely to collect is to love without reciprocity, to name without being known, to hold without being held. But the collection is not a sanctuary, it is a séance, a summoning of what refuses to stay buried. The photograph is torn, the letter is foxed, the lock of hair curls like a question mark. Even the archive has a body and it is failing. I hold a stone from the path to Top Withens, it feels like a breath caught in the throat. It fits in my palm like a secret. Or a wound. Or a promise I can’t keep. I don’t know if it’s hers. I don’t know if it’s mine. But I keep it. To have. To hold. To lose. And still, it slips through.