There is a kind of drawer almost every person has. Sometimes it is in a desk, sometimes in a box in the attic, or in a cupboard we rarely open. Inside, there are no treasures and no valuable things: a train ticket, a letter, a keychain, a photograph, the key to a house where no one familiar lives anymore, a broken watch, a shell brought back from a vacation over which forgetfulness has settled. Seen from the outside, all of them seem useless, and yet it is hard for us to throw them away. Not because we need them, but because, in some difficult-to-explain way, we feel that they still need us. We are used to believing that we keep objects because they remind us of the past. Perhaps the truth goes a little further. Perhaps we do not keep the objects themselves, but try to preserve the relationship we have with the person we were when they entered our lives. A concert ticket is not only a piece of paper; it is proof that, one evening, we were in a certain place. That we sang, that we laughed. Or that we were someone other than who we are today. Objects have a strange way of preserving time - not calendar time, but lived time. That is why there are things we have not used in twenty years and still cannot part with. They are no longer necessary, we no longer need them, but by throwing them away we would be left with the feeling that we had erased a page from our own story.
Of course, not all objects deserve to be kept. Sometimes they become burdens. Other times, they remain only out of guilt or fear that we might regret letting them go. But there are also objects that continue to have a purpose, even if they no longer have a function: they tell us who we were and, sometimes, who we have become. That is why people stop in front of an old box and spend a few minutes looking at things they had not intended to search for. They are not looking for the objects; they are looking for themselves.
There is a reason why, after the death of someone dear, the first thing we often touch is an object that belonged to them - a cup, a pair of glasses, a piece of clothing. We know very well that the person is no longer there, but through such gestures, for a few moments, closeness seems possible. Because objects do not preserve people, but the traces of our encounter with them. This may be one of the least noticed roles of objects. They do not stop time, nor do they turn it back, but they make it habitable; they give it form and allow it to be touched. That is why photographs are placed in frames, wedding rings are worn for years, children sleep with the same blanket, and some people keep, for decades, a small note that someone else would throw away without reading. The value of these things does not lie in the material they are made of, but in the story they keep open.
In such cases, the difference between an object and a symbol becomes visible: an object can be replaced, a symbol almost never can. An ordinary cup breaks and can be replaced by another. But the cup from which a grandmother drank her coffee every morning is no longer just a cup; it becomes a place or a time. This is the transformation people make without realizing it: from time to time, they take an ordinary object and move it from the world of things into the world of meanings. From that moment on, it stops being measured by usefulness and becomes measurable by what it keeps alive. By keeping it, we learn to distinguish what merely occupies space from what preserves meaning, because life is not made only of what happened to us, but also of the traces we choose to keep. Precisely because, in some cases, an object so ordinary that no one else would notice it can quietly tell the most important part of our story.
- RN