things i have kept for no reason

• hotel key cards

• gift bags with my name on them

• wristbands from events

• rocks

• business cards from shops and restaurants

• an old New Yorker magazine

• clothes that don’t fit (whether they ever did or not)

• ribbons from gifts and shopping bags

• broken cups and their pieces

• dried flower petals

• socks missing their twin

• tiny little balls of yarn

• a broken necklace from Egypt

• old id cards

• a 10$ bill i was gifted and supposed to use at a now-bankrupt fast food chain

• empty cosmetic jars

these are some of the things i have kept for no reason.

i could never be a maximalist. my shelves are cluttered, i have boxes big and small filled with things, even my journals are bursting at the seams with postcards and stickers and airplane tickets. i’m sentimental, plagued by nostalgia, always have been. i have a desire to remember. to remember everything i have ever done, ever felt, ever thought, ever experienced.

the thing is though, most of the things i find stashed in boxes, i don’t even remember where they’re from. i’ll find a rock hidden in a corner of the library and rack my brain for hours and still not have a clue where i got it, or why i kept it. what was so special about it? i kept it to remember something, but that something is already long gone.

other things i could tell you exactly what they mean. what trip it was from, who gave it to me and when. there’s a whole story behind it, sometimes more than one. these make more sense i suppose; i keep the thing, and the memory that comes with it.

and then there are the nonsensical ones. why keep a lone sock when i know i will never wear a mismatched pair? do i believe its twin will materialize out of thin air one day? i keep broken pieces of ceramic and tiny strings of yarn because, hey, they might be useful for some future creative project i know will never see the light of day. logically, i know i shouldn’t be keeping any of these things. sentimentally though, i hold out hope.

so no, i could never be a maximalist. things are just things, and all that. but memories and hopes live in the things we choose to keep, in the objects we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw away. there are so many happy memories, so many old friendships, so much of my past contained into this one necklace from Egypt, i could never part with it. and perhaps i see the future in the balls of yarn and the broken ceramic, waiting for a project that may one day materialize. even the rock i can’t explain is proof that i was somewhere once, that something made me stop, pick it up, and carry it home.

so all the things i keep for no reason turn out to have a reason after all. it’s not logical, but it was never meant to be. we don’t keep these things because we’re bad at letting go. we keep them because they’re the small, quiet evidence that we were here. and that is reason enough.

fin.

bree beauregard

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