I lost the nail-cutter/filer I bought in 2015 in a city down south, recently. It makes me anxious that I don’t have the exact same one anymore. A friend of over 7 years. It feels like a loss.

I was only ever in that city once, and only for about 5 months.

This pen I was gifted I think in 2019 in the western part of the country by my best friend? Also stopped working. Makes me mad.

I still keep it around. What for? Who knows.

My memory boxes are filled with trivial things. Small and weird. I don’t think I’ll ever throw them away. They are 2 in number. I have boarding passes from my first few flights too. If these airlines hadn’t started giving those poor quality prints on normal, thin paper, I’d still be collecting all of them. There’d be a 3rd box just full of them. Each one is special… important.

I remember when my first break-up happened. I realised she was only in it because it was convenient, not because she genuinely liked me. I was 14. I was consuming movies where people would burn a “relationship remains” as a very visceral way to move on. So that’s what I did. One evening I took all the letters I had received, all the unsent letters I had — and burned them. (The digital archives were lost to time too.)

That was the last time I did that.

It seems as I’ve grown older, the need for a new memory box, and to keep things in there has diminished. Not because I don’t feel the same level of attachment to objects, but because I’m overwhelmed at the thought of what this would look like in ten years. An entire room of just memory boxes? And anyway, how much stuff am I even getting these days? Almost nil.

Anywayyy, I often wonder if this burning-it-away ritual is what I should do now, too, in order to move on from people and from events. My body hates the idea of “deleting” anything. I stand awkwardly between these two paths.