My Mexican grandmother, who everyone called Nena, moved even more than we did when I was little. Her husband Jim was a crane operator who helped to build dozens of marinas, bridges, and man-made islands in Southern California, and Nena followed him from city to city. Finally, in San Diego, she made her stand. He could travel for work, but San Diego would be their permanent home.

This was all reported to my two older brothers and me by my mother, Nena’s eldest daughter, who had become a hippie and refused to be contained in any categories such as Catholic, Mexican-American, or married. My parents split amicably after moving us to the canals of Venice, California, in 1967. Our neighbors were a diverse lot who shared little except the habit of smoking marijuana and the desire for a better, more peaceful world. I accepted this bohemian village as the way things were and adopted the adults’ disdain for all things “square,” such as plastic toys, big American cars, and working 9-5.

My mom had wanderlust, and she took us kids traveling. A summer trip to Europe morphed into endless travel in California and Oregon, in search of an ideal place to live and raise us. We ended up in a brand new commune in the Santa Cruz mountains, living in tents and building a house in the woods; my oldest brother and I soon bailed on the whole idea, opting to go back to the Venice canals and live with my dad, so we could attend school more regularly.

That summer, newly turned 11, I was invited by Nena to visit her for a week. I can’t recall if I took a bus south or was driven, but I ended up walking from Nena’s Cadillac at the curb, over to a newish apartment complex and up the stairs to the second floor. She opened her front door and I stepped into what my young mind perceived as a slice of heaven.

Velvety blue plush carpeting covered every inch of the floor, and cool air purred from an AC unit. Sunlight emanated through long drapes, casting a dim half-light into the interior. White furniture was arranged along the walls of the living room, and a white and gold coffee table gleamed in the center of the room. Between the love seat and a couch stood a triangular mostly-glass display shelf. The angular shelves were lit from inside the display, and one shelf held a few sparkling glass figurines. I stepped close, mouth ajar.

The largest figure was a triangle of glass, faintly blue, with etched figures cut into each pointed edge. Nena took it out and carefully turned it in her hand before my eyes, saying the three different views represented the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I immediately lost interest and shifted my attention to the much more appealing rounded blue shape on the second shelf.

It was a plump bluebird blown from deep indigo glass. With its short sharp beak and tiny pockmarks for eyes, it seemed to be looking at me. Nena smiled and took the bird out, letting me hold it. She told me it was “The Bluebird of Happiness” and I believed her as only a child can. She told me about her father, a writer and philosopher, and how he would walk with her in the plazas of Mexico City when she was a child. She said he spoke to her about how to find happiness in life, by being useful and speaking the truth. I carried the bluebird around for hours that day, cradling it in both hands as if it were alive.

The week with Nena passed by too quickly, the glorious indoor setting matched by the courtyard between the two arms of the apartment complex, with its lush greenery, cement fountain, and comfortable patio chairs. Better than all of that, I could walk to the municipal pool just four blocks away in the local public park and swim and dive for hours in the crowded aqua rectangle of clear cool water. And on the way home, I could buy a cherry Slurpee from the 7-11 store at the corner and not have to share it with anyone.

Nena loved to spoil me, taking me to movies, shopping for cute outfits, and out to eat BLTs and French fries, my two favorite foods. She took me to Old Town to see the horses and eat churros and taquitos while she sat under an umbrella and drank a margarita. Admiring the murals and the blue-and-white pottery, she said to remember we were Mexican, not Spanish. She drove me to beaches and parks, showing me what she called “my San Diego” while I dreamed of living there.

My family did move to San Diego, and I attended school again for years, going on to a nearby college for a year before launching off. Years later, my husband and I sailed to Baja California, and I found myself feeling oddly at home in Mexico. I pictured Nena walking with her father in the shady plazas and that intergenerational link inspired me to write poetry and essays and to think of myself as a writer. Visiting Nena and Jim in their new double-wide mobile home, I shared my Baja stories, and she glowed with pride.

Years later, Nena’s dementia mandated her move to a memory care facility, where she spoke Spanish to her caretakers and called everyone Honey. I’d visit her after work and we’d sit in the sun. When are we going back home, she’d ask me. Mañana, I’d say, and kiss her smiling cheek.

Her bluebird lives with me now, in my floating home, nested in a snug drawer in a jewelry box that holds other trinkets she and my mom gave me. I’ve given much of the jewelry away, but the bluebird will stay, bringing happiness through memories of Nena and our shared love of Mexico.

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Jennifer Silva Redmond is the author of Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat and a freelance editor. Her writing has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, and on sites such as Brevity. Formerly editor-in-chief of Sunbelt Publications of San Diego, Jennifer is now their editor-at-large. Her book reviews and posts about writing and editing can be found on her Substack, Editor on Board. She lives with her husband Russel, an artist and teacher, aboard their sailboat Watchfire, somewhere on the West Coast of North America.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“darling we are plushies” by , fernacular

“Personal Heirlooms: The Favorite Possessions That Tell Your Life Story” by , Living Elsewhere

“Our Favorite Food and Drink Souvenirs” by , American Weekender

Out of six siblings, only two baby pictures from my Japanese American father’s family survived. One of them I keep by my front door: a sepia picture of a Japanese Girls’ Day doll set, complete with an emperor and empress, courtiers. Families display Girls’ Day dolls each year, a Japanese tradition meant to celebrate girlhood and wish daughters happiness in marriage. Not so traditionally, this set included Kewpie dolls because my Japanese immigrant grandfather wanted to include some American context in this Japanese setting. Next to the dolls, there’s an infant sitting upright in a basket. In front of the baby, there’s a vase of chrysanthemums, signifying wishes for long life. The setting is the porch of a wooden farmhouse in Northern California sunlight.

The baby is my oldest auntie, Hisa.The remaining family pictures were burned by her younger brothers. One of them was my father.

The story behind this first picture’s survival is a small miracle of kindness.

Before the war my grandparents Junichi and Shizuko were sharecropping to support five children, with a sixth on the way. I don’t know how my grandfather was able to muster enough funds for a set of Girls’ Day dolls. Before my auntie Hisa was born, another girl had died in infancy. But my grandfather was determined to celebrate the strength of this new infant girl and bought this doll set. Somehow he had this photograph taken.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the majority of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were shocked. Like many other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, my father and his family were told that they had to burn anything with Japanese writing on it, including photographs, in order to disavow any connection with a wartime enemy.

Though my father died in 1984, when I was 10 years old, he left an unpublished typewritten manuscript of his wartime incarceration that he called Daruma: The Indomitable Spirit. He describes this episode in two short passages. In the first passage, the family is sitting around the dinner table and my grandfather is reading instructions from a local Japanese American organization trying to help the authorities:

The document was in both English and Japanese and, according to the first paragraph, written at the request of the United States government. My father read the letter carefully. Then at dinner that night he announced, “One of the things that puzzles me is that it says to destroy everything with Japanese writing on it. Then right after that, it says to burn all pictures.”

‘Even baby pictures?’ Nob asked.

‘Why pictures?’ I asked in all innocence.

‘I guess because they show locations, and that could be used by spies or something like that,’ my father reasoned.

‘Then why baby pictures?’ Hisa persisted.

‘Maybe baby pictures are not included,’ my father concluded, and then added doggedly, ‘The letter specifies all pictures though.’

In the second passage, my father and his older brother Nob are outside, burning pictures and books and papers with Japanese writing—as instructed.

Then we started with the pictures. We wondered about the wisdom of it all as we fed the fire. Nob and I talked about saving a few and hiding them somewhere. We talked about it some more and concluded that Father would not permit it because he did try to follow the law when possible.

‘I still don’t understand why we have to burn all the pictures. What good would these family shots do anyone?’ I said as I pitched a baby picture of Nob in the fire. Taking a last look at each one before burning them, I felt that a part of me died with each picture that went up in flames. It was no joy to part with cherished mementos from the past, and even though we wanted to save a few, we reluctantly tossed them in the burning pyre.

“The reason for burning the pictures is because we’re supposed to be spies. Don’t you know that? After all, the saying that’s going around right now is, ‘The only good Jap is a dead Jap,’ Nob said.”

I had read my father’s manuscript as a child, and that scene of baby pictures burning haunted me for decades. Then a different auntie, my auntie Sadako, gave me the family set of Girls’ Day dolls. Even though she had sons, she asked for the dolls because she wanted to display the set each year and teach her sons to respect women. (It worked, by the way.) She kept the original set preserved and added on to the display, adding the set of court musicians and the footmen and other trappings of the Imperial court.

With the dolls came the picture of the set—and with it, that picture of my oldest auntie. The dolls and the picture of my auntie Hisa are the only belongings that were returned to my family after the war, kept by a kind neighbor. When they returned after four years of imprisonment, the rest of their belongings had been stolen.

And yet. Not long after I inherited the doll set, I also inherited my oldest auntie’s scrapbook, and here I discovered the second baby picture that survived the war, also of the same auntie. I don’t know much about this picture or its circumstances; it’s a picture of an infant swaddled in blankets, in a wooden high chair. It’s labeled “Me” in my aunt’s handwriting. She also kept other pictures from her childhood in her scrapbook. Now I think she must have carried them into the prison camps and back.

In my head I now hear my aunt’s question in my father’s book (“even the baby pictures?”) differently. Her question was not just an exercise in critical thinking, not just an act of resistance, but also an act of self-preservation. I now have two photographs that speak to wartime racism: You do not get to define me. This is who I am.

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Join Tamiko Nimura and Open Secrets Magazine on Tuesday, November 17 at 8:30 p.m. ET for our next Show and Tell on Substack Live, where we’ll be discussing and sharing our favorite possessions. Open to all. Watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Subscribers will be notified when we go live.

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Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American creative nonfiction writer and community historian. Her words have appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, Smithsonian Magazine, and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle. She is a frequent contributor to Seattle’s International Examiner and Discover Nikkei, project of the Japanese American National Museum. She is co-author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press, 2021). Her most recent book is a memoir entitled A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake (University of Washington Press, 2026).

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“My daughter’s Day of the Dead altar has changed over the years” by , The Halfway Path

“The Library” by , Survive Your Story

“What America Is Living Without” by Alissa Quart, The New York Times

The décor of my childhood bedroom burst with the white and red of baseballs, the brown of footballs, the orange of basketballs. I hated those colors.

One year, Santa brought Jen, my older sister, a large, shiny, pink Easy-Bake Oven. After mixing water and a little packet of sugary powder, it would deliver delicious-smelling little cake patties. She’d spend hours decorating them with icing and sprinkles. She swirled blue and white, purple and yellow. Watching her craft the color combinations was all I needed. Of course, I wouldn’t have minded a taste, but sharing dessert was a bit too much to ask of an older sister.

Because I was a boy, Santa brought me a Creepy Crawlers Bug Maker. Like the Easy-Bake Oven, the Bug Maker heated molds to be filled with a pre-portioned concoction; but instead of sugary treats, it produced inedible, stinky, rubbery bugs. Boys were to hide these in their sisters’ dresser drawers and drop them into their mothers’ purses. Boys, I inferred, were not to produce anything that could be enjoyed. Boys were meant, even when they baked things, to create fear.

Nonetheless, I sought some enjoyment in selecting goop of my favorite colors—pink and purple—to yield fantastic magenta fireflies and scorpions. It would be ten years before I’d be able to connect my unspeakable tastes to the truth of my identity. I was a queer kid. It was quite simple. But in my early 1990s suburban world, queerness only manifested as the nefarious threat of AIDS, or as sitcom interior designers. It could never be used to describe a little boy. And yet, queer is what I was—ever so quietly, confusedly. So, I spent my childhood accumulating piles of unused orange and green goop packets, which, to this day, I’m sure, remain undegraded, perfectly preserved, in a landfill somewhere: abandoned monuments to an overdetermined masculinity.

Like her Easy-Bake Oven, I admired Jen’s collection of Baby-sitters Club novels from afar, out of fear of being caught curious. Each Baby-sitters Club novel was distinguished by its own color and seemed to center on one girl out of an ensemble cast of babysitters, whose names I would never know. I admired the collection lined up like a horizontal, pastel rainbow, noticing which colors Jen had the most of, wondering if the colors indicated a meaningful pattern or if the colors were random. The magic of color seemed reserved for girls’ possessions. For boys, variation and exuberance was taboo.

The Baby-Sitters Club series had R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps as its masculine corollary. However, unlike Creepy Crawlers, Goosebumps didn’t feel like consolation. I hungrily collected these R. L. Stine books when I learned I could read them without raising any suspicion. My parents worried about me reading Goosebumps books, but their concerns, in my mind, were for the right reasons. They weren’t worried about me being insufficiently masculine; they were worried I would be afraid and have nightmares. I could leverage this concern, insisting I wasn’t sissy enough to let a book scare me. I was telling the truth, too: They didn’t scare me. They fascinated me. I cared less what happened in the novel itself than I did about the cover designs. Each book paired two unique colors against each other, putting into relief the gleaming, embossed word “Goosebumps” arching over the top of each book.

In Ghost Beach, my favorite of the 62 Goosebumps novels I collected, protagonist Jerry and his sister, Terri, visit distant cousins in a New England beach town. After meeting a trio of siblings, the five kids discover a mysterious cave where they encounter a strange man who they mistakenly identify as a ghost. They devise a ghost trap, but in the process of enacting their plan, Jerry and Terri discover that, all along, the three kids they’d befriended in the beginning of the story turned out to be the dead ones. The old man was a ghost-hunter—a good guy. Jerry and Terri had to venture into the unknown to reveal the truth, and that revelation changed everything. Most Goosebumps novels contained a brilliant twist like this, and often centered on a brother and sister pair of siblings, like me and Jen.

The novel’s unique teal and cream color combination would permanently, synesthetically tie the discovery of ghosts to the gentle, neutral blues and tans of the beach. My favorite entries in the series correlated perfectly with my new favorite colors, suggesting a chicken-egg quandary: Did my enthusiasm for the color shape my reception of the book, or did my love for the stories I read influence my favorite colors?

I’ve grown into the kind of person who often buys a book simply because it’s the right size and shape. Slightly larger than a trade paperback, thick enough to fan through the pages with my thumb, never a hard cover, and preferably no deckled edges. I prefer a book whose color pops out, juxtaposed against whatever publishing trend is monochromatically painting the shelves. If a book violates any of these preferences, I’m less likely to enjoy it—even if it’s brilliant.

While usually ill-advised, for me, judging a book by its cover means I’m doing the work of healing. I get to make this choice now that I’m older, now that I have nothing to prove to anyone. And while my shallowness might deny me some enjoyment or even intellectual revelation, it’s worth it to me to always choose the shiniest, prettiest objects I can find. I’m still making up for lost time.

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Brenden O’Donnell is the author of Geek Out: a memoir, pedagogy, and cultural criticism newsletter. He’s been published in The Audacity, The Queer Love Project, Sitting Queerly, and more. His manuscript-in-progress is a queer millennial coming out memoir. He lives with his husband, Peter, and dog, Willow, in the Boston area.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Keeping Score” by ,

“How Old Family Quilts Are Finding New Life As Cozy Keepsakes” by Kait Hanson, Southern Living

“I Wanted Affection From My Ex-Spouse — But I Got An Automated Flower Delivery That Taught Me To Communicate My Needs” by Kate Washington, HuffPost Personal

“From tattered flags to treasured keepsakes, Shadow Lakes volunteer repurposes retired American flags” by Rose Panieri, Shaw Local

“Constantin and Laurene Boym on Sticking It Out” by

“Where’s your wedding band?” my daughter Maggie asked, sitting on the couch with her 7-week-old daughter in our small TV room.

I sat in the once golden armchair and looked at her, and then my hand. She was right; my wedding band wasn’t there.

I looked up. “Oh my God,” I said. “I know exactly where it is.”

I never take my wedding band off. I take the other three rings I wear daily off as one when I go swimming or go to sleep. My engagement ring and the two guard rings—one that Matt gave me after our first baby, Maggie, was born, and another I whined for—were a package. They were essentially one ring.

When my daughters were little, they liked to play with my rings, but I never let them play with my wedding ring. It was part of me, like a fingernail or a freckle. It was me.

Earlier that day, I had gone in for an MRI for my back. I’d been in significant pain for several months and couldn’t walk long distances anymore because my leg hurt. I couldn’t go upstairs easily and couldn’t trust my leg.

The tech brought me to the dressing room, told me where to put my clothes, and that no metal was allowed in the MRI. I had to leave my rings and earrings behind. I took everything off, including my mother’s gold watch I got when she died 20 years ago, and put them in one of my sneakers. I hadn’t come prepared with a purse.

I walked into the room with the big white tunnel of a machine.

“Okay, lie down. Here’s a ball for you to squeeze if you need me when you’re in the machine. What kind of music do you want to listen to?” asked one of the techs.

My breathing was ratcheting up. My heart was beating faster.

I flipped through artists. “Carole King?” I asked.

“Sure, and would you like other music like hers? We can play the Carole King station.”
“Yes.” I gave the thumbs up.

“Ready?”

“No. I can’t do this. I’m so sorry. I just can’t.” I sat up.

“It’s okay.”

I started crying. Tears streamed. “My daughter had emergency gallbladder surgery recently and she just had a baby and I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

The two techs couldn’t have been kinder.

I went back to the dressing room and put my clothes and jewelry back on.

In the TV room later, I realized, I had put the three rings on, but left my wedding band behind.

How was I going to tell Matt? I didn’t want him to think I was careless. With my ring, or my love.

Unlike the horror I was expecting, he took my mistake in stride. “I know you love me,” he said, “and if you’re going to lose a ring, that’s the least expensive one to replace.” It was a simple gold band—no diamonds—just engraved with our initials, MMB and MDBB, and the date 9/10/88.

“But it’s the one you put on my finger,” I said.

“It just shows how stressed you are,” he said. “It’s okay.” I had watched my daughter labor at home, then drove her and her husband to the hospital and then, I learned later, that the birthing had been difficult, all of which was hard on me, her mom, and a new grandmother. Caring for her, the baby, and her husband in our house was fun, but also work.

I made calls to the MRI place. No one had turned in a ring,

In class the next day, I told my students. In unison they said, “Oh no,” and sighed.

A few days later, I went back in to try the MRI again. This time, I had taken a muscle relaxant, diazepam, beforehand, and Matt drove me and played on his phone while he waited for me in an armchair outside the MRI room. I listened to Carole King and put a sleep mask over my eyes. I got through the MRI.

We gave the receptionist my phone number in case the ring showed up. I wasn’t optimistic. I moved my rings around on my finger to minimize the loss I felt.

A full week later, my phone rang at 7 a.m. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Michelle from the MRI office on Concord Ave.”

I held my breath.

“They found your ring.”

“Oh my god. Really?”

“Yes, in the laundry. I came in this morning and there was a note on my desk, but I didn’t think I could call you at six.”

She could have. I would have taken it.

“Thank you, thank you,” I repeated. “This makes me so happy. Thank you. I can’t come in because I teach all day. But my husband will get it.”

At school, a few hours later, I told my students. “They found my ring.”

Sixteen voices in unison, said “Ahhhhh”.

When I got home from work. I said, “Matt, did you get my ring?”

He came out of the TV room and picked it up from a plate on the dining room table.

“Wait,” he said, “I have to put it on. The receptionist told me.”

I slid the other rings off my finger and Matt slid my wedding band back on, 38 years after the first time. Maybe it wasn’t as romantic. I wasn’t dressed in a white wedding gown. There weren’t any flowers. But in my teaching outfit of pants and a sweater, the moment was just as significant. It bore the testament of time.

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Morgan Baker is the author of the award-winning memoir Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes. She teaches at Emerson College and virtually. She is the managing editor of The Bucket. She lives with her husband, four dogs, and her daughter, son-in-law and grandbaby in Cambridge MA. Find her at www.bymorganbaker.com.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“A Reckoning in October” by , Writer, Interrupted

“Time Is A Thief And I Keep Losing My Wallet” by , The Laundry

“Clutter Practice” by , The Clearing

“You don’t use it. So why can’t you get rid of it?” by

I believe we can still be in conversation with and linked to our loved ones after they’ve left this earth. They communicate with us through signs, symbols, dream visitations, and the physical possessions they leave us. I keep James’s guitar pick in my wallet. Holding the triangular plastic memento in between my thumb and index finger makes me feel close to my best friend even though he’s gone.

Our friendship started on a social media site late one night in the early aughts. He’d posted a video of him playing a song in his bedroom that caught my attention. He fumbled with the opening chords, stopping and restarting a few times to get it right. James sang softly as if his parents were in the room next door sleeping, which they probably were. His voice and the chords made me stop whatever else I was mindlessly doing online. I commented asking for the name of the song. His response came swiftly. “My Guardian Angel by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.”

Soon we discovered we lived just a mile apart in our leafy Nashville suburb. I walked over to his house where we’d listen to music for hours, him showing me bands I’d never heard of. He’d walk me back, making sure I got home safely.

When my parents decided to move our family overseas in 2009 as the housing bubble was bursting and my father’s work in residential development dried up, the one who was hit hardest was James. Looking back at the letters he wrote me, it’s clear he was struggling. I just didn’t see it at the time.

As a parting gift, he’d bought us general admission tickets to see Coldplay. They were on their Viva la Vida tour, and I knew just about every lyric on their new record. They were a band I’d grown up listening to as my dad often had their songs playing on our family’s stereo when we were doing Sunday chores or just lounging around the house.

Both the paper butterflies that fell from the arena’s ceiling and the tears that fell from my eyes during “Yellow” surprised me. Tears continued falling as the concert ended, not wanting our time together to stop. Home was a feeling I felt wrapped in while in his arms. I gathered up the colorful paper butterflies now on the floor and carefully put them in my pocket, keeping them for years to come. I didn’t want to leave James, my best friend, whose love I felt so deeply but didn’t have the words to express.

As best friends in early high school, I hardly said “I love you” out loud, or at least I don’t remember saying it. James wore his heart on his sleeve and more aptly expressed his emotions whenever he had the chance. He left me with carefully curated CDs and letters explaining why each song was included. He wrote, “You’re my best friend, and I will love you always and forever.” He also left me with his guitar pick. A red Peavy, 0.73 mm. James gave it to me when I visited him during a Thanksgiving break in college. My own family was still abroad and James’s family welcomed me into their home.

When I’m holding the guitar pick or listening to his playlists, I feel his presence along my back. His angel wings caress the sides of my face. Even if he no longer graces the earth with his physical presence, I feel deeply connected to him.

He once told me that he still thinks of me every day. I remember in the moment—and shortly after he passed six years after that fateful Thanksgiving—feeling guilty that thoughts of him didn’t take up equal mental bandwidth. But now that he’s gone, I see him everywhere. Whether it’s in the kindness of others, the warmth of a full bear hug, or the signs and symbols I get from him. His guitar pick lives in my wallet, and I now think of him every day when I get a peek at it. It doesn’t take much for me to feel his love and presence from the beyond.

Our friendship started with a song about a guardian angel. I wouldn’t understand the full meaning of this until he was no longer here.

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Natasha Krell is a scientist and writer living in the greater Boston area. She’s currently writing a memoir about the parallels of shared experiences across generations. You can stay up to date on her writing by signing up for emails on her website: natashakrell.com. When she isn’t writing or working, she enjoys volunteering for animal welfare causes and practicing Reiki.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“My Ex Threw my Couch off a Roof.” by , Ghost & Co.

“Alice Coltrane Changed Everything. 3,000 Records Later, He Had to Let Go.” Vinyl Vibes

“The Neuroscience of Decluttering” by Emily Falk, The New York Times

My necklace is a kind of Theseus Ship—a thought experiment that asks, How much of something can you replace before it transforms? If charms and chain are continually lost and replaced, is it the same necklace at all?

First, it was a crucifix, purchased in the Vatican gift shop. Then Jesus fell from the crucifix, making it a cross; eventually the cross fell off too. The chain snapped, to be replaced with a cord from my prom dress. A plastic engagement ring was added from a fake proposal, then a peridot charm from my grandmother, then a wooden heart from a friend’s trip abroad. The ring was lost. The cord ripped. I found a new chain, and another. I added a new engagement ring when my real engagement broke.

I still call it my cross, which I suppose reveals where I stand on the Theseus Ship debate, but the people who have entered my life since the loss of the original pendant get confused when I make the cross I bear jokes and tell me it isn’t, which I suppose reveals where they stand, too.

I once lost the necklace when an ex—before he was an ex—took me on a day trip, a two-hour drive to an hour hike to a waterfall in the woods. We swam, and we laughed, and my shoulders blushed from the sunlight. The day still lives on in my memory like it is perfectly preserved and jarred. I took the necklace off to swim. I didn’t notice I’d left it behind until the ride home, when my hand met my chest to search for a familiar weight and came up empty.

As any rational person would do, I screamed.

Kyle—the not-yet-ex—nearly crashed the car.

I cried; I wailed; I begged him to turn the car around. A bystander would have thought I’d left a child behind. Kyle explained that it was getting late, the park would be closed—besides, we’d never find our way in the dark. Kyle was logical, and rational, and calm. I was a storm.

When I realized I couldn’t convince him to turn back, I became mute. Anything Kyle said was met with an icy stare, an irate silence.

The cross still had a cross, though it hadn’t been a crucifix for years. The prom dress cord had only just begun to fray. I’d worn it almost constantly since the day I’d bought the bones of the original, and I felt lost without it.

I knew it wasn’t fair to blame Kyle, but I did—for taking us out there in the first place, for not seeing it on the rock when he packed up his bag. Resentment flooded me.

I found a sad song on the radio. I turned the volume up. I brooded.

I thought of the cross, of each story I’d strung on its shifting chain. I thought of the trip to Italy. I thought of the boy next to me on the flight, his clammy hand holding mine, his brilliant smile—and the rumors he’d later spread in school about us sleeping together in San Gimignano. I thought about prom. I’d been dumped right after buying the tickets, and I spent the whole dance trying not to cry. I thought about the year my grandmother gave me the peridot necklace, back when she could still talk. Right before the surgery to remove her cancer, when her esophagus curled into the empty cavity where her lung had been and she spent three years silent, thin, and ethereal, like she was practicing to be the ghost she’d become.

I started to wonder what I was holding on to. I thought about Kyle, about our brilliant afternoon in that sun-speckled grove. Kyle, who told me he wanted a future with me—a future that could mean so much more than my past, if only I could let it. I thought about what it might mean to let go. My breathing slowed; my sobs became a quiet sniffle.

When Kyle and I got home, I didn’t apologize for my behavior in the car, though I know I should have. It would be a few years before he wrenched that one out of me. Instead, I took his hand in mine, led him upstairs to the bedroom, and spent my night thanking him for everything he was to me.

In the morning, I reached into the space beside me, looking for him. Instead, I hit bare blankets, heard a light metallic clink.

There, the cross, and a note.

Woke up early. Love you.

The relationship lasted a few more months; too many other things were wrong. The pastoral hike, the loss of the necklace, the swell of love in its wake—it was a small oasis in a desert. We never could have stayed there. Still, I find myself connecting our breakup back to that moment: hanging that familiar weight back around my neck, like being force-fed my past. My disappointment in Kyle for being so oblivious to the person I wanted to be, the one who could leave it behind.

It was an incredible, sweet gesture. I knew that then, too. It wasn’t all resentment that I felt, reading that note. Much like our relationship, the highs and the lows overlapped—but they couldn’t cancel. For all the ways we loved each other, there was always the sinking, sad knowledge that it wasn’t right. When he eventually ended things, it felt like hope. This way, we can finally be friends, I told him. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be.

These days, I keep the cross as a reminder that I, too, am a Theseus Ship. I still treasure all the wayward, broken pieces of my past, the lessons I have learned and the people I have lost. I string them on new chains alongside new friends, hold them close to my chest, cherish their weight as I move with joyful anticipation toward new beginnings.

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Liz Abeling is the CNF editor for After Happy Hour Review and co-founder of the writing collective, Scribble House. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she works for the local cemetery and spends her spare moments trying to write under the watchful gaze of two tyrannical cats. You can find her work in Hippocampus, Barrelhouse, The Journal, and others.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“I Purged 46 Books in One Day and Feel Guilty About It” by

“The Minimalism to Analog Pipeline” by , Journaling Home

“why I started collecting physical media” by t., negative spaces

“What the Hell Does “Vintage” Even Mean Anymore?” by

“12 Things people actually want to inherit and it’s not the expensive stuff” by Tamara White, Yahoo!

“I haven’t lost all my marbles.” After a pause, I add, “Yet.” I chuckle at my corny joke, a response to a co-worker asking about the colorful marbles I display in a box on my desk.

My collection of 34 marbles includes a few large boulders, an old clay marble, my favorite swirly shooter, a few aggies, several cat’s-eyes, and a handful of plainsies. I wish I still had a steelie. I’ve carried them from job to job over the past couple of decades as my personal inside joke when things get stressful. Their significance has changed over the years.

When you come from a family line of generational mental illness on both sides, the reference to “losing your marbles” might feel insensitive. My mom always had a great sense of humor—despite her bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and years of cycling in and out of mental institutions—and I’m sure she’d approve. She often joked about our family’s “good genes” when referring to mental health. Her laughter filled rooms.

At 16, doctors prescribed Valium for her emotional outbursts. In the late 70s, while institutionalized, she underwent shock therapy. None of the early treatments helped. Years later, modern medication brought stability, if she took it.

Some marbles in my box came from my mom’s childhood. I found them in my great-grandparents’ house, tucked away in one of the many saved Imperial margarine containers my Depression-surviving great-grandma couldn’t bear to throw away. Every time I hold her marbles, I think of the little girl playing in the same backyard my brother and I played in.

My brother and I visited her in mental institutions and group homes, and sometimes she came over for the holidays. He and I were close. Throughout our childhood, it was always “Chris and Michele” or “Michele and Chris,” like a single, fluid name. Whether we were in foster care, hanging out at our great-grandparents’ house, visiting our grandmother in California, or living with our grandfather, we were almost always together. Born only 14 months apart, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that it was my role to take care of him.

But I wasn’t able to keep him safe.

Some marbles are from my childhood collection. Chris and I would dig small ditches in the dirt next to the garage at our grandpa’s house and play for hours. We’d each toss in the same number of marbles. But if the game was “for keepsies,” I didn’t use my favorite milky green swirly marble, for fear of losing it. Belly down in the dirt, thumb cocked against our index finger, we’d take turns hitting our chosen shooter into the pit, hoping to knock the others out and add to our collection.

When the voices he heard after smoking PCP-laced marijuana when he was 16 didn’t stop, Chris was sent to a psychiatric unit. I was devastated, and he was never the same. He was released with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia he never fully accepted, even into his forties. He’d vacillate between taking his medications and, when he started feeling better, stopping taking them. More than once, I received a call from him after he left everything behind—his belongings and his apartment—because he believed someone was after him and he needed a place to stay. The invisible enemies were hard to escape when the voices were loud.

The middle of the night emergency calls surprised me occasionally, when they both were still alive. Mom called, cycling after days of no sleep, to accuse me of stealing an inheritance—which didn’t exist—from her mother, or of sleeping with my stepdad. The voices played tricks on her mind. She died in 2013, her COPD taking her without warning. I wish I hadn’t let her last call go to voicemail.

My brother sometimes called me a fucking bitch because he thought I was laughing at him. The voices always lied, and I knew it. He died from complications of the COVID-19 virus in 2021, while I sat with him and reminded him of all the things we did together, including our hours of playing marbles in the dirt.

I miss them both.

Some days at work, I open my wooden box and roll a marble between my fingers. They’re bright and cool, unchanged by the hands which have held them. My mother’s. My brother’s. Mine.

The three of us shared much of the same DNA, yet the mental illness skipped me. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. But I ended up being the one who reminded them to get some sleep, eat healthy, and take their medications. I was their safe place to land. The one who buried them both and was left alone in the end, holding all the marbles.

When I say I haven’t lost all my marbles, it’s true.

I keep the ones I have in a small box on my desk to remind me of the ones I’ve lost.

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Michele Peters writes from the heart with a goal of bringing light into dark places. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and discovered the power of her voice and stories when she read live for the nationally syndicated show Listen to Your Mother in Spokane, Washington in 2022. Her work appears in So God Made a Grandma (March 2025) and The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope (June 2025), and at Short-Reads.org. Michele is currently writing a coming-of-age memoir and regularly shares nonfiction essays at Light into Dark Places on Substack.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“MY MOTHER’S NAIL FILE” by ,

“Melanie Masarin’s Most Prized Possession” by , Shop Rat

“My Collection of Historical Hair” by , My Collection Of

“Walking in Her Shoes” by Alison Damast Dolinger, Short Reads

“The 1969 Pyrex Pattern Collectors Dream Of Finding At A Thrift Store” by Becky Britton, Yahoo! Life

On the built-in bookshelf in a small room in my apartment sits a ridiculously large ceramic piggy bank. Its white ceramic complexion is decorated with hearts, stars, and splotches of color made by dipping a sponge in paint and pressing onto its surface. There is a thin black painted smile, a painted pink snout, and two small black dots for eyes.

On the side it reads: Oinky, The Pig.

Oinky sits among a few other objects on the shelf. A miniature drum kit, three signed baseballs in display cases, a plastic cup with Jiminy the Cricket on it, filled with tiny plastic ducks. These items were carefully curated to be kept out of storage when I moved into this apartment from the condo where I raised my two boys. This room has no windows as it was built into the original layout and is where one child sleeps when he comes home from college. I have LED lights that illuminate the playful memories and can be seen from the pull-out couch where the other one sleeps when he’ is home at the same time.

Oinky is comically big for a piggy bank, and impractical, yet here it sits. My youngest received a small silver piggy bank when he was born that could fit into the palm of your hand. I have no idea where that is. Likely it was purged alongside so many other things that were so easy for me to part with. I’m a constant de-clutterer. I live in downsize mode. I get rid of anything that isn’t being used. I scanned the kids’ art, and they were asked to sift through their rooms yearly, getting rid of things they no longer wanted, clothes that didn’t fit, schoolwork that’s relevance had expired. I routinely go through closets, drawers, and cabinets, reorganizing, tossing, and updating.

I love throwing things away. I love giving things away.

But Oinky remains.

I need two hands to move it. If it was used as a piggy bank, and it was full, you wouldn’t be able to lift it; I’m certain of this. The bright paint of the stenciled stars and hearts are smudged around the edges, and the little legs that support its globe-like body are painted without a plan, two purple, one blue-green, and one seemingly a mix of all those colors.

I tried to get rid of it.

It would sit in the clear-out pile, time after time.

But I couldn’t do it.

The sentimentality surprised me.

I couldn’t even understand why.

I don’t remember making Oinky.

But I can imagine their little hands, dipping sponges in the paint, stretching their small bodies to reach it in the center of the table as we created something new, together. The four of us, as it would’ve happened before my divorce. I imagine us admiring our work, and the giggles that came when naming it. I do remember that for a little while, we saved some coins in it. Once a dollar bill was shoved in the slit up top and it took tweezers and patience to remove it from the bottom hole. Even the coins took some deft maneuvers to get them to land just right to drop out of the center.

Useless as a piggy bank, it became a decoration.

And over time, it became more. This giant ceramic impractical pig reminds me that I did play, even though memories skew to the constant balance of single parenting, working, and the endless to-do lists of motherhood. I continued to find fun things to create and experience, among the more tedious tasks of managing money, time, and emotions. It holds memories and possibility, instead of coins and dollars. Keeping it, and wondering why, gives it life as it searches for new meaning.

I imagine when my kids have their own places and less real estate on my shelves is thoughtfully curated for them, Oinky the Pig will remain. It will have a prominent place like a piece of contemporary art, the personal equivalent of a Jeff Koons balloon animal. It will be an intentional part of my décor, reminding me of resilience, playfulness, imperfect parenting, and the invisible, and surprising, magic that can be found in the impractical.

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Sara Lavan is a dancer who has always loved to write, or maybe a writer who got distracted for a while with dance. For a while, she found a way to blend the two. She built a career creating programs that center creativity, community, and well-being. Sara fills her life with all things dance and movement, and considers words part of that rhythm. She is in her third act after many life changes, including her kids going off to college.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Living with found fragments and meaningful objects” by , Cultivating Color

“Practical Tips on How to Place Art in Your Home” by , Art for Breakfast

“Acquiring New Things Won’t Make You Happy - But Maybe This Will” by , The Life Edit

“happier at home (in Amsterdam!) with Snigdha Bansal, who’s discovered ‘joy in the sisyphean struggle of keeping house’” by , Be Less Careful

“I took the first step to living like a minimalist and it felt surprisingly unsatisfying” by Tanza Loudenback, Business Insider

All through high school, college, and my early twenties, I made intricate photo albums that showcased my life in a way that wasn’t reflected in my mom’s family albums. My friends and I snapped candid shots of each other: at school, at parties, at Baskin-Robbins. I sent away the disposable cameras in paper envelopes, and when the prints arrived, I pasted them in albums, carefully labeling each photo, giving each page a block-lettered title, often including items like concert tickets or magazine cut-outs.

When asked what items I would save in a fire, I always said my photo albums. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer, so I had a strong urge to document my life. I wanted to remember what I was doing, what I was wearing, who I was with. I knew one day I’d get old and forgetful, and I’d need a concrete way to remember the details of my youth.

When digital photos became the norm, I stopped making physical photo albums, but I lugged my albums with me everywhere. Took them to New Orleans after college and to DC after that. When my boyfriend and I decided to move cross-country, I hauled the box of albums to Seattle, where we put it directly into a storage closet. When we moved to Minneapolis a year later the box went, again, directly into storage. Or so I thought.

After Minneapolis, we moved to Maryland, and, one day, I went looking for my photo albums. I was writing a young adult novel, and I wanted some inspiration from my high school years.

But the photo albums were nowhere to be found. I tore through all the boxes in our storage unit, but they weren’t there.

I refused to panic. They’d turn up eventually. Or so I thought.

Some months later, I was on Facebook and noticed there was a hidden section of messages: a place for messages from people I wasn’t Facebook friends with. I started scrolling through years of messages, mostly spam.

But then there was a message that stopped my heart. It went something like this:

Hi Eva. This is Laura from ABC Moving Company in Seattle, Washington. I found a box at our warehouse that must have fallen out of one of our trucks. The box was partially open, and I could see it contained photo albums. I figured whoever they belonged to would probably want them back, so I hope you don’t mind that I looked through the box and figured out your name. I can keep the box here for you for a few weeks. Or, if you let me know your address, I can ship it to you.

“Oh my god!” I shrieked. “Oh my god, my photo albums!” I was filled with a rush of adrenaline that quickly turned to dread when I looked at when the message was dated: almost two years ago.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I messaged Laura back, wondering why the heck she’d contacted me on Facebook. Didn’t the moving company have my contact info? Except, no, they didn’t. When we were living in Seattle, my husband had been my boyfriend, and we’d had different last names. It was his job, anyway, that had arranged for the moving company.

Laura’s reply came, and it was what I had feared: When she didn’t hear back from me, they’d gotten rid of the box.

I messaged her back something like, “Got rid of…as in you actually threw it away???” I couldn’t fathom it. I simply couldn’t comprehend that someone could take my photo albums—all those years of hard work and precious memories—and toss them into a dumpster.

How could the movers have been so careless? (But why had I not packed my treasured albums in the car, safe with me, on our drive to Minneapolis?!) Equally frustrating was the fact that I could have gotten the box back had I only checked my weird Facebook messages. Most depressing of all: My photo albums were truly gone forever. Now I would have to rely on my memory alone to recall the specifics of my youth.

I’ve lost other things I really loved: earrings, sweaters, a favorite lunchbox. But losing my photo albums brought on a sorrow I’d never felt about any other material object. It felt like losing a piece of myself. I had an ache in my heart for months. Even a year afterward, when I thought about the lost photo albums, pain settled in my chest.

When my high school and college friends heard what happened, they scanned their old photos and emailed them to me. Some were photos of my teenage self I’d never even seen. Their efforts didn’t make up for the lost photo albums, but it helped. And, like all loss, time made it easier to bear.

The Facebook message happened about ten years ago. I still think about the photo albums, but much less often. When I do, I no longer feel sorrow. I think, Gosh, it sucks I’ll never be able to show my daughters my prom pictures, but…oh well. Because, in the end, even our favorite things are just things. Turns out I still have the memories, after all; I can even conjure up images in my mind of some of my favorite pictures from those lost albums. Plus, I’ve taken a lot of great photos since then. The loss just doesn’t feel as bad as it did initially.

You know what else? I’ve started making physical photo albums again. They live on a shelf in my living room, so I can keep a close eye on them. But if there’s a fire, I’ll prioritize saving my kids. And my cats.

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Eva Langston received her MFA from the University of New Orleans and is represented by Ali Lake of O’Connor Literary. She is a writing instructor and the creator/host of the podcast The Long Road to Publishing, which was recently named one of the best podcasts about the writing business. Eva lives in Maryland with her husband and two children, and her writing resources newsletter on Substack has over 7,000 followers.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“I’ve been selling my Mum’s belongings.” by , Life Before Plastic

“Things That Are Better Secondhand” by , Long Live

“The Le Creuset dutch oven” by

“living inside our bags” by , please employ me

“Wanted: Lost T-Shirt, Perfect Green” by Heidi Fettig Parton, Essay Daily

“Winter Coat” by Isaac Amend, Brevity

In the corner of my bedroom is an old desk in the Queen Anne style. I’ve moved it from apartment to apartment, house to house, coast to coast, over the past fifty years. I think of it as my desk, but one could debate that.

It is called a secretary writing desk and has cabriole legs reflective of the Queen Anne period. It’s made of walnut and has a drop-down front that conceals cubby holes and small drawers where I hide keys and such. Below the front panel is a drawer that spans the width of the desk. It’s not a very practical piece of furniture, and I don’t know that it has any monetary value, but I like the look of the graceful S-curved legs that were popular in the 1800s, and it blends well with my other bedroom furnishings.

In the late 60s, when I was a student at The Art Students League of New York, I shared a furnished railroad flat with a ballet dancer who studied at Carnegie Hall. The desk was in the front room next to the only window in the apartment. I slept in that room, which led into a middle room where Carol slept and endlessly practiced her leg extensions. Directly behind it came the kitchen and finally a bathroom. No hallways, no doors except for the bathroom. It was an old building, probably built about 1900. It’s possible that the desk predated the building.

Our apartment was four stories up and cheap. An Italian restaurant took up the first floor. We had lived there for a year when Carol was offered a job with the Philadelphia Ballet Company, and I decided to move in with friends a few blocks away.

Furniture was always being relocated from one apartment to another in the building. Most of it was old and in bad shape. Sometimes I saw pieces tossed out next to the garbage cans for pickup. Since I had no furniture of my own and had always liked the desk, I asked our building manager if I could take it with me. I should make clear here that the man had a serious drinking problem and had always been flirtatious with me. He lived in a dark and slovenly studio on the second floor with a wife who rarely spoke.

He said yes to my request and a neighbor helped me carry it downstairs and maneuver it into the back seat of a large taxi that took me to my new digs. Some weeks later I received a letter from my former building’s management company demanding return of the desk. Apparently, someone was paying attention to the furnishings. I was told to report to the corporate office, located near the Flatiron building, on a specific day and time. It never dawned on me that I could ignore the summons.

On the appointed day, I showed up at the office and met with Mr. Greenspan, a tall, thin man with a long narrow nose and a heavy New York accent. He was probably in his fifties, which at the time I thought quite old. I sat down in a chair across from his desk. He called me a thief and threatened to have me arrested. I immediately burst into tears. I’d never before been accused of stealing anything. Embarrassed and ashamed, I was terrified that my parents, whose address and phone number were listed on my rental application, would find out. In between sobs, I hemmed and hawed about how I came to take the desk because I didn’t want to get the manager in trouble. Greenspan suggested I pay for the desk. I no longer remember the amount, but it didn’t matter, I had no money.

In the end, I dashed out of his office, red-faced, having agreed to return the desk. Mr. Greenspan said he would get in touch about how, when, and where this should take place. I no longer had a key to the building. The manager was rarely around to open the front door, and I couldn’t leave it on the sidewalk or carry it up four flights of stairs to my former apartment.

Weeks passed and then months as I waited anxiously to hear from him. But he never got back to me, and the company never contacted me again. That’s why the desk has remained with me all these years and how it happens to reside in a corner of my bedroom. Mr. Greenspan has probably long departed this earth, and I don’t think the company would any longer have records of the incident. It is said that possession in nine tenths of the law. So, I suppose I should finally accept that the desk belongs to me and let go of the unease I still sometimes feel when I look at it.

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Marcy Kelly worked in communications and press relations at US government agencies and nonprofit organizations before transitioning to creative writing. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have been published in magazines and collections. Seek Higher Ground was featured as Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine. Essays, on topics including grief, trauma, and loss, have appeared in online publications. A script she co-authored received a best screenplay award from the Producers Guild of America. She studied creative writing at UCLA and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Antioch University. Marcy lives in Los Angeles, hosts Meet the Author events, and is involved with charitable causes. www.marcykelly.net

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“What Drove Me To Buy These Striped Sweaters?” by , NEVERWORNS

“What Survives” by , Spirals

“A tale of two teakettles” by (Note)

“My wife, our campervan, and me” by James A. Lomastro, Boston Globe

“The Most Expensive Dinosaur Just Sold for $50.1 Million” by Julie Brener Davich, The Wall Street Journal

What kills me is that the bus route is printed on the old ticket, a purple square of paper I bought at the Rebellious Jukebox record store for five bucks. The five-dollar price tag kills me too. Most concerts were twelve bucks in 1990, but Fugazi made their shows all-ages and cheap.

I was 19 when I rode the city bus to that Fugazi show at Lake City Concert Hall, a horde of Seattle punks spilling from the seats: Mohawks, leather jackets and pierced faces, a few understated kids in plain flannels and Chuck Taylors and Levis like I wore. “Grunge” hadn’t been coined yet. This was a year before Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Some of my friends in the D.C. hardcore scene told me this great band was coming through, so I’d bought a ticket without once hearing a Fugazi song.

I was a queer kid and I wasn’t sure if there were other queers on that bus, but riding to that concert was one of the first times I felt less alone in my life.

It was a soul-killing, arduous task to be out and queer in 1990, a time when we gay people were excommunicated from the human race. I’m not exaggerating when I say that gay people were not considered to be human beings in the 90s. We were clocked as monstrous creatures by mainstream society, where thousands of parents disowned thousands of sons dying of AIDS in lonely hospital beds. Instead of family, we Gen X queers had friends. Our friends were our world.

My Seattle friends in the punk/straight edge scene knew my story, that I had dropped out of college in Arizona, the only state I’d ever lived in, and followed a woman here, to this city where I knew no one, and then...she married her boyfriend. My friends knew I was in love for the first time, then flattened with devastating heartbreak. I hadn’t yet been in a mosh pit, but my friends knew this Fugazi show might just be my cure.

Now, I’m 55 years old and that little square of purple paper serves as proof. A kind of Gen X. I.D. It reminds me what little 19-year-old Molly managed to do. My parents paid my first month’s rent and then expected me to make the next month’s payment or come home. I had to land a job quickly. I was getting resumes copied at Copy Mart when I saw their for-hire sign and just started working there. I made five dollars an hour making 3-cent copies for lesbians from the Wild Rose bar around the corner and I hung out with the punks I met on the job. I was living like a full-fledged adult at age 19. Only now can I see how young I actually was.

I didn’t know that I had arrived in Seattle at a watershed moment in American music.

I knew that I’d followed love here. I knew that I’d followed a woman here and that we both were in love with music and were both following that music and that intense love for it to Seattle.

These days I also still own a cassette tape of Nirvana’s Bleach, the Sub Pop album that preceded Nevermind. That object comes close to meaning for me what the Fugazi ticket means, because, like a paper ticket, a cassette is proof in a format that’s not manufactured anymore. And that cassette is the closest I have to some proof that I attended the Nirvana Motorsports show in October of that year, proof that I was there to see Nirvana with the Mudhoney drummer on stage and Dave Grohl in the audience deciding if he wanted to be in the band.

This is probably a good moment to ask myself why I need and keep proof of anything. Is my 90s archiving a weak, desperate part of my 55-year-old self that clings to a nostalgic past? Am I just trying to prove that I was, for a brief, fleeting moment…cool?

Sure. Alright. That’s part of it. Because I was barely two years out of high school when I went to that Fugazi show, and in high school I’d been a freak and an outcast. I got ridiculed everywhere I went. Being cool in high school would have meant feeling safe.

I’ll cop to it: All of us high school losers keep proof of our living well as the best revenge.

But that Fugazi ticket stub also means this: my first time moshing, all of us balancing and swaying as we wait for the band to start, all packed in, sweaty body to sweaty body, our feet nearly slipping off the wooden arm rests, my friend Mary trying to put a contact lens on her eye as we jostle and sway. Bam! The bassline pounds and the first chords rip out. The moshing is this weird miracle. The friction of the fast, gutty melody disintegrates the boundaries of our bodies into fusion and collapse and frenzy. We are angry kids drowning in bliss. We are the roar of a fierce, unstoppable lion, not bodies, not flesh—we, all of us, become pure sound, liquid sound, a mighty flood ripping giant trees from the earth.

My ticket stub says that for the first time in my life, on June 1, 1990, I felt truly alive.

Unafraid.

I knew I could kill my depression, belong with people, and live a life worth the hassle.

Now in 2026 as my beloved country collapses under dictatorship, ruled by total dicks who are the same total dicks from 80s high school, I can grip this ticket between thumb and forefinger, feel the grit of the cheap construction paper, and find the fierce youth I’ll need for the fight ahead.

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Molly McCloy is a four-time Moth slam winner and Lambda Literary Fellow. She won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” contest for nonfiction and The Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press who will publish her memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth in September 2026. Her work has been featured in O Magazine, excerpted in the Blue Mesa Review and Foglifter, and broadcast on the Best of Risk! podcast. She earned an MFA from The New School and teaches writing for the awesome students of Pima Community College.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“A vinyl collector with one rule – he can’t keep anything.” by

“Collector’s Lot” by

“bare bones living” by , writing out loud

“For These Millennial Fountain Pen Fans, Community Is the Real Collectible” by Rachel Myrow, KQED

“You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don’t Take My Mix Tape” by Kera Bolonik, The New York Times

“My Deranged Quest to Hunt Down a Viral Pumpkin-Head Gumball Machine” by Joshua Lyon, Wirecutter

It was a Saturday morning in March 1996. My boyfriend was sitting on the couch, my head on his lap. It was early, and I’ve never been a morning person. I was dozing, moving in and out of alertness. I heard him talking to me but didn’t register what he was saying. I opened my eyes and saw the ring. He asked me to marry him and I said yes.

This beautiful ring was white gold, with a central star sapphire and purple amethysts on either side. The star sapphire was a deep periwinkle blue. When held in the sunlight, the sun’s rays shone like a star in the center. The amethysts, my favorite stones, were royal purple and framed the sapphire on either side. I cherished this ring because it was unique and special, just like his love for me. Our love sparked quickly after years of friendship. We got married that August.

Our lives together were full of work, going to concerts, and walking around the city holding hands. He would attend all of my dance concerts, even when the Mets were playing. He’d listen to the game on headphones, take them off during my time on stage, then put them back on while the rest of the dancers were on. Dance wasn’t his thing, but I was.

About a year into our marriage, I was doing laundry in the basement of our building. I was feeling grateful for the convenience of having laundry downstairs, making it simple to stay on top of things. Neither of us were home very often and it was easy to get behind on housework, which was never-ending. As I moved the last of the clothes from the dryer to the basket, I looked down at my hand: The sapphire was gone. I frantically searched the laundry machines and the clothing but I couldn’t find the stone anywhere. I was devastated. I went back to the apartment, sobbing, feeling utterly gutted, and called him.

It took months to get the stone replaced. First they put in a new star sapphire but the amethysts were missing (WTF?!). How had it taken so many months, why had they taken them out, and why didn’t they put the ring back the way it was? The sapphire was a much darker blue than the original, and the star was a bit uncentered, but I was focused on the missing side stones. After another month or two I finally got the ring back, all stones in place, but the amethysts were also different. They were more lilac, almost pink. I was tired of waiting, my naked finger missing my special ring. I decided it was good enough.

Our lives had settled into a comfortable pattern, each of us getting busier with work and other activities and having less time for each other. He traveled for his job as a B2B journalist, I dove into my yoga practice, and we just kept going. We fell into a comfortable and steady pattern.

After multiple moves, graduate school, two children, and many years of financial and other struggles, we were always on the edge of getting ahead when something would happen: a job loss or a major medical expense, that derailed our plans. We chose to divide and conquer with the kids and their activities. Most days we both felt exhausted, and had little time or energy for each other. Sex wasn’t on the table, even when I asked. While he yelled at the umpire on TV, I was alone in our room. I was slowly disappearing in the marriage. I tried to “fix” the marriage by working on myself, but there were two of us.

In 2016 we took our annual family trip to York Harbor Beach in Maine. I had taken off all my rings, earrings, and necklace and put them in my bag for safekeeping. We spent the day at the beach, jumping in the waves until we were numb, building sand castles, and taking photos to remember it all. I played with the kids, but avoided eye contact with him. I spent more time on my towel reading than I had in previous years. He would start talking to me and I didn’t notice until he called my name.

On this day, I felt like I was going through the motions. I was coming to the realization that the marriage was over and that I wanted out, but I wasn’t yet ready to share that with him, or even say it out loud. When it came time to get cleaned up for dinner, I couldn’t find my ring. All my other jewelry was there, but my engagement ring was gone. I searched in the bathroom where I’d gotten changed, I looked in the sand where we’d been stationed, but it was gone.

This time, I didn’t care. I was surprised to notice how right that felt. Somehow my body knew before my mind did. My heart felt settled for the first time in a long time. That’s when I knew that the marriage was truly over.

The ring that started our journey together was gone, and now it was time to move forward alone.

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Janine Agoglia is a licensed acupuncturist, yoga instructor, and mom to two young adult men. She has written two books, Living Yoga: One Yoga Teacher’s Journey to Surrender and Intentional Eating: Finding Peace and Balance in Your Relationship with Food, both available on Amazon. She also writes the Substack “Yoga Living 50 and Beyond.” She’s a GenX, Type A, recovering perfectionist who tries to live her yoga practice, both on and off the mat. She lives in Central Massachusetts all by herself, and loves it.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“My Barbells Sad Lament” by

A letter from Albert Einstein (Note by )

“You Inherited Boxes of Family Photos. Here’s Where to Start.” by , The Unexpected Genealogist

“The Emotional Architecture of Home: Family rituals, traditions and the little things we pass down” by

“Clutter Was the Enemy—Now It’s a Design Choice” by Zoë Sessums, Domino

If you had to suddenly flee your home, leave your country, and only take whatever possessions you could carry, what would they be? Money? Jewelry? Photos? A special book or musical instrument?

My grandmother grabbed her pillow.

Litzi, my maternal grandmother, wasn’t typically forthcoming with stories of her traumatic past as a Vienna socialite-turned-Holocaust-refugee. However, when I was about 10 years old, she told me about the dense goose down pillow crowning the twin bed in her tiny Chicago apartment.

In her thick Austrian accent, she’d say, “This is the only thing I have left from home. It was my favorite pillow, and I grabbed it when we had to flee.”

Why a pillow? I wondered. Then surmised, “Oh, what a great way to hide your expensive jewelry! Quick thinking, Grandmum!” I couldn’t imagine any other reason for a pillow being the one and only thing to grab from a huge household of valuable treasures.

“No, no…I just wanted my pillow.” She shrugged, with that distinct, vacant gaze I’d see whenever I asked for details about her former life in Vienna.

A touching story but still I shook my head, incredulous.

I hadn’t thought about the pillow in a long time, until eight years ago when I embarked on a major purge in preparation for downsizing from a largish house to a smallish condo.

My mother, Litzi’s daughter, had become more of a hoarder as she aged. This was likely the result of not adequately dealing with the trauma of her refugee childhood and extreme poverty, the ultimate reversal of her previous generation’s wealth.

After my mother died, my husband and I confronted piles of QVC and department store clothing, housewares, and trinket purchases stacked floor to ceiling in her home, much of it still in their original bags. Most items we donated or dismally tossed into a rented trash dumpster, and some boxes ended up in our basement. Years earlier, when Litzi died, my mother had acquired her beloved pillow, but it was apparently lost in the chaos of the cleanout. What was once a treasured item and sole symbol of home ironically became a victim of pathological overabundance.

In making the decision to downsize, I vowed never to make my own children deal with too much of our stuff. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became my bible and Marie Kondo my guru. Over a full year, I spent countless hours in our basement, going through boxes of every kind of household item imaginable, very little of it making the cut. It was, essentially, an archeological dig of our immediate and extended families’ lives, spanning decades. The process was stifling.

I was driven and ruthless, sorting, tossing, and donating. Whenever I’d waver, I thought of my mother’s hoarder home. In the end, I was proud of how very little made it to the keep pile.

One afternoon, announcing “I’m going down to the dig,” I took some deep inner-resource-gathering breaths, visualized our pristine waiting condo, and resolutely descended the stairs to the basement. I opened boxes filled with Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, exclaiming, “I’ve hit the 80s!” and moved them to the “get one of our kids to try to sell this on eBay” pile.

Then I got to my mother’s boxes, most filled with long-forgotten photographs. A project for another day. The next box was full of linens—some new, still in the package, and the rest crisply washed, ironed, and folded. The decades-old starch scent brought a flood of childhood memories of my favorite Mary Poppins sheets and my old bedroom. As I dug through the linens, moving them one by one to the donate pile, I caught a glimpse of—could it be?—yes! Mary Poppins pillowcases!

The brightly colored pillowcases depict Mary with rosy cheeks holding her red umbrella in one hand and Michael and Jane Banks’ hands in the other as they fly above the rooftops of London. Her magical rose-bedecked bag is flying along with them. As a child, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting and fun. These pillowcases inspired dreams of travel, whimsy, song, and dance, along with many stories and games.

“Ohmygod, Mary!” I exclaimed. It was like seeing a beloved friend after 50 years. Digging deeper, I found more of my childhood pillowcases—Batman, ice dancers, circus animals—which together with the music and magic of Mary Poppins basically defined my young emerging personality, foreshadowing who I am to this day. The pillowcases could easily justify a small amount of space in our downsized linen closet. Definite keepers!

Now, when our two young grandsons sleep over, I let them choose which pillowcase they want to sleep on. “What do you want to dream about?” I ask. “Fighting crime with Batman? Flying over London with Mary Poppins?”

The 4-year-old, an avowed animal lover, always picks the circus animals. “I want to pet a lion!” he exclaims happily.

The 7-year-old has cycled through all the options depending on his mood. During the winter Olympics, he dreamt of being a figure skater and opted for the ice dancers.

I see these joy-sparking pillowcases whenever I open my linen closet and wonder if they will persist through future generations.

I imagine my grandkids saying, “These are some of the few things my grandmother kept when she downsized.” Maybe they’ll even remember the story about Litzi’s goose down pillow from Vienna.

Families can have all kinds of legacies—good and bad. I’d always assumed ours was about persecution, perseverance, survival, and trauma.

But I’ve come to realize that our family legacy is actually about pillows, and my pillowcases are constant, colorful reminders. After generations of persecution, we have survived and rebuilt beautiful lives in new places. The trauma is subsiding. What has persisted is that we carry peace, home, comfort, rest, and relaxation wherever we go.

We carry the freedom to dream.

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Elizabeth Surlin Gordon lives in the Chicago area and writes poetry, essays, middle grade/YA fiction, and a holistic wellness column for Our Evanston magazine. Over the pandemic, she wrote the children’s book, Where Is Everybody? Her work has been published in BAC Street Journal, Point of View, East on Central, and 10^th Ward Lit. When not writing, Elizabeth loves musical theatre, travel, QiGong, making music, art, and stories with her two young grandsons, and resting on pillows.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Old Jewelry on Old Paper: Understanding Jewelry Through Antique Catalogs and Ephemera” by

“10 uses for a pocket notebook to keep you off your phone” by

“Someone Found a Box Full of ’80s Transformers on the Curb, and It Is Every Collector’s Dream” by Vaspaan Dastoor, Comicbook.com

“Can Thrifting Be A Form Of Overconsumption?” by Elizabeth Whitehead, Refinery29

Saturdays were Mom’s hair-washing days. She let it hang loose to air dry, the only time I would see her hair down rather than curled into the everyday bun or the elaborate French twist that were her typical day and evening leaving-the-house styles. She didn’t have a blow dryer, and didn’t want to put her hair up until it was dry, so Saturdays after we moved to the U.S. from Tokyo, where Dad’s service as an Episcopal priest had brought our family in the 1960s, were also Mom’s bread-baking days.

The bread she baked was a classic 70s loaf, dense with whole wheat flour and wheat germ, sweetened lightly with honey, enriched with dry milk powder. She made three loaves a week for several years before she got a job, cut her hair, and bought a blow dryer. But in that sweet (for me) period when her work was primarily raising a family, she showed me how to bake bread. She made it look easy. Although sometimes I wanted more explicit instruction from her, with bread, she just did her thing and expected me to follow along. So I did.

She would pull the big yellow Pyrex mixing bowl down from the cupboard and stir together warm water, honey, and yeast. Once the mixture was bubbling, she’d add the flour, milk powder, and wheat germ, its vacuum-sealed jar cracking open with a satisfying whoosh. She set her rings on the windowsill to keep the stones—a diamond and a deep blue star sapphire in an intricate gold setting—from getting doughy while she kneaded. Sometimes I slid the rings onto my own fingers and stretched out my arm to admire them; sometimes I was more in the mood to punch and prod the dough. A few hours later, the kitchen warm and fragrant, she’d pull the loaves from the oven and cover them with one of Grandma’s faded tea towels, scolding me away from slicing the loaf warm. Even though I secretly longed to eat store-bought white sandwich bread, those comfortable Saturday mornings with my bread-baking Mom were a step on my path to cooking independence.

My firstborn, Ben, was a few weeks old when Mom and Dad came to visit us in San Francisco. Unlike friends whose moms sat impatient and distracted in hospital waiting areas, magazines open but ignored in their laps, or were even invited into delivery rooms, I had asked my parents to wait until we were a bit settled, until I was surer of myself as a mom. What I couldn’t anticipate was that their arrival would coincide with Ben being gripped by colic. Our house rang with sharp cries; I felt caged and exhausted. I started tracking my meals and Ben’s, trying to find a link between what I ate and what upset my baby, overwhelmed by the extra effort of trying to both diagnose and alleviate the discomfort. Gluten was suggested as a culprit, so I gave it up, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t make a difference. It didn’t, and I was glad; devoted as I was to this unfamiliar new creature, I still couldn’t imagine being so self-sacrificing as to give up the deeply-rooted comfort of bread.

It would make a tidy story if Mom baked bread during that visit, reminding me of the pleasure it used to provide me, or if her presence gave me the time to bake bread. It wasn’t anything like that. But she commiserated. She held the baby a lot. She dosed Ben with gripe water when I couldn’t bring myself to put the dropper—the first thing Ben had tasted besides breast milk—into their wide, wailing mouth. She came along to the lactation consultant with me and fled with me just as quickly when she said Ben was tongue-tied and suggested having their frenulum snipped. Gripe water was hard enough; I couldn’t possibly surrender my tiny infant to a scalpel.

And then one morning, she blow-dried her hair and Ben stopped crying. She discovered an on/off switch we didn’t know Ben had, using an appliance that I, with curls so different from her hair, didn’t even own. When she left at the end of the week, she wrapped the cord around the little travel dryer and handed it off to me, knowing how essential it had become. My husband Tony and I got in the habit of taking it with us when we went to friends’ houses, pulling it out like a party trick: plug it in, turn it on, watch the baby drop to sleep. Eventually we bought a proper white noise machine which lived under Ben’s bed and traveled with us and helped the whole family sleep.

I learned to bake bread on easy Saturdays, watching Mom knead dough in a kitchen that smelled like honey and yeast, her rings glinting on the windowsill; I inherited the blow dryer in the midst of a less peaceful time. Neither gift announced itself, “This will help you mother.” But I can make three loaves on a weekend morning, and I know where the blow dryer is if I need it. Both are hers, and both are mine.

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Caroline M. Grant is co-director, with her husband, of Sustainable Arts Foundation. She has published essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other outlets, and has co-edited two anthologies, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat (Roost Books, 2013) and Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008. She was editor-in-chief of LiteraryMama.com and has taught writing at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives in San Francisco with her family.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Flowers Against Darkness” by , Inhabitable Images

“Minimalism: A Love Story” by , Burned Haystack

“What Does Your Clutter Say About You?” by , The Harmonious Home Approach

“The Full-Contact Sport of Estate-Sale Shopping” by Grace Yoon, The Wall Street Journal

“The Return of the Vanity” by Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times

The rusty blue dumpster behind Second Chance Animal Shelter towers above me. Wedging one foot into a corner, I pull myself up and over the ledge, balancing on mounds of plastic garbage bags. Ripping open the nearest one, I begin to search.

Working at the animal shelter is my first job since my 17-year-old daughter’s life ended on a stormy country road two years earlier. Like the turquoise green earrings Ellen was wearing, my heart and spirit were crushed into bits. In my previous life, I was a teacher. I have always loved interacting with young people, the give and take of the classroom, the excitement of new ideas. But now, young voices are excruciating.

In the surreal weeks and months that followed Ellen’s accident, teaching myself to play the songs she had written became the only thing holding me here. A natural musician, she had taught herself to play guitar and had written four dozen songs in only a year and a half. Through an unimagined sequence of events, gradually I began performing her music, to share her with others, and keep her present, in a sense. It became the one thing that offered any purpose.

Now, working with animals in the shelter also provides some comfort. They each have stories of loss. I sing to them as I work. On this particular morning, however, I don’t sing. I have twice the usual number of runs and cages to clean, so I hustle from cell to cell, quickly changing my plastic gloves between each. Though something feels odd, I am too focused, moving too fast, to fully notice. It isn’t until I get home that I realize what.

When Ellen’s belongings returned to me after the crash, I began wearing the iridescent opal ring I’d given her when she’d turned 13. Suddenly her ring is not on my finger. This is the second treasure of hers that I have lost. A small, lopsided stone, reminiscent of a heart, on which she had lettered I ♡ U Mom, had been worn smooth by my fingers’ unconscious reassurance that it was still in my pocket. Until one day it wasn’t.

The loss of these things is a manifestation and magnification of my bigger loss. These objects are tangible representations of her that I can carry. They are things she touched and made and cared about. I know they cannot replace her; they can’t bring her back. But they were hers. Each new loss is a deeper reminder that she isn’t going to return. If she were still here, a ring would just be a ring, a stone would be a stone. Now these things symbolize her—they provide a physical presence that I can hold.

The ring is really gone. Despite hours of searching, I can’t find it inside any of the gloves in any of the garbage bags in the entire dumpster. Maybe it washed down a drain while I scrubbed the animals’ dishes. Or perhaps it slipped off as I walked with Ellen’s dog after work in the chilly October woods.

It’s not coming back. Ellen isn’t coming back. But I can’t stop searching.

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Naomi Bindman’s poetry and prose has appeared in magazines and literary journals, including Mothering, Friends Journal, El Portal Literary Journal and South Florida Poetry Journal. They won Dogwood Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Award and received funds from the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Humanities Council. Naomi is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. Her memoir, You’re the Words I Sing, the story of Naomi’s journey back to life performing the songs of her daughter, Ellen, is currently on submission with major publishers. A film based on the memoir is in active development with a leading Hollywood company. This essay is drawn from a chapter in the memoir.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“A Meditation on (Moving) Stuff” by , a ladderto the stars

“Collection: Hands” by

“How do you decide what to keep of your parents’ stuff?” by , The Shrieking Cactus

“Thrift Shopper Was Told Her New Ring Was Worthless. Then She Took It to a Cash for Gold Exchange” by Ashley Vega, People

“The Strange Business of Selling People Their Own Family’s Photos” by David Pogue, New York

“The ‘Pokémon princess’ with a £90m card collection” by Emily Smith, The Telegraph

Softly running my fingers through the coarse hairs of Kevin’s beard, we lock eyes. “When you’re dead, I’m going to chain smoke all day long. I can’t wait.”

“That’s the good part of me dying first; you get to smoke,” he says. Not that he’s stopping me. He just knows that I’m taking a break. Four years so far, and I don’t plan on starting again. Until he’s dead. That’ll be the right kind of catalyst. Excuses are different from catalysts. Willpower is a helluva drug if you’re stubborn like me. It can also be compulsive. Which is why the blister packs have accumulated. I want to measure success, waste, failure, rhythm. It feels empty and complete all at the same time.

“You want a cigarette?” Kevin shouts as he pours coffee in the kitchen.

I side-eye the pillow my head is lying against, tucking in my knees close to my chest. It’s not a shame reaction. It’s a holding-in-my-excitement reflex as I clench my teeth. “Yes!”

Moments later, he enters the bedroom, two mugs clambering together in his right hand, as he outstretches his left: a fist faced upward only to uncurl like a flower blooming just for me.

This is the ritual every morning. Coffee. Cigarettes. Skin on skin. All the smells.

The cigarette is: a candy-crusted little pillow. A sweet little rectangle with a nip. A distinct burning type of dank spice that unfolds with each bite of peppermint, or spearmint, or wintergreen. The outer shell dissolves quickly as I knead the gum with my molars and then pocket it; in my cheek, under my tongue, in the small den that once occupied the wisdom teeth on the left lower side of my jaw.

Three shoeboxes contain row after row of sharp, silvery blister packs of off-brand nicotine gum. It’s a Rolodex of scents due to the many already-been-chewed pieces stowed away in empty slots—a habit when I can’t find a nearby garbage bin. Dried saliva, my DNA, is in many of these little packets, filed away, marking my ongoing addiction that began as “quitting.” It’s better than smoking, but it’s still habitual and relentless. Without it there’s rage, and that’s what I stave. Pockets and purses are verified before leaving the house. Prophylactic. Mood stabilizing.

Kevin cooks often.

“Taste this.” He guards the spoon as if not to spill, while his left hand is outstretched, waiting. He wants the gum first. ABC. Like a mom asking to give it up. I never spit directly. Rude. Silently, a choreographed dance of sorts, I place it in his palm.

“Damn, that’s kick. It’s good.” I wanna get punched in the face. With fire. Craving the feeling of being alive is the name for this. Give me cowboy coffee and habanero hot sauce. I want to terrorize my body, but only if I’m in charge. Give me sorrow and give me grief and give me gum.

After our first year of dating, I showed Kevin my collection of plastic-y foil bubbles. “It’s like a sculpture,” I said, “but it keeps growing over time.”

“You can make your own gum wall like in Seattle, but…a not-gum, gum wall?” I could see the wheels turning in his head.

Every finished pack goes into a shoebox. There’s no option to recycle these things. They’re trash. I hung onto them one by one, reluctant to throw them away out of guilt. And then I fell in love with some kind of beauty. Aesthetics. Somatic sensations. The growth. It was all so satisfying.

A fixation on cessation breeds unease. It’s many things. Are my teeth going to fall out? Investigating my gums with my tongue, I wonder if they’re receding too fast.

An acquaintance, colleague, or friend watches me pop a little chiclet into my mouth.

“Hey, can I have a piece of gum?”

“Only if you want Nicorette,” I say. “If you don’t smoke, it’ll make you feel sick.” I’ve learned to shrug off the mild discomfort of outing myself.

After all, I spent 20 years loving smoking cigarettes and didn’t care if anyone saw me. I didn’t love smoker’s cough, walking up hills, and knowing that people could smell it on me. At my age, I’m not sure if my wrinkles are from smoking, genetics, or choosing to opt out of injectables. Although I covet the skin of many of my peers, I’ve learned to appreciate my wins and what I do have: three shoeboxes chock-full of empty nicotine gum packets. A man who likes to cook.

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Lera Acey (b. 1987, Québec City, Canada; raised in Pittsburgh, PA) is a practical nurse working in acute care. She has a background in filmmaking and new media, with writing for galleries and arts publications. Her work moves between nursing and art, shaped by care, observation, and language.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“5 summer upcylcing ideas from my closet to yours” by , Front Porch Threads

“Upcycle Files” by , Preschool Maximalist

“My Collection of Hot Wheels” by , My Collection Of

“A birthday gift for a partner with dementia brings unexpected joy” by Marc Silver, NPR

“‘Throw it all out’: My parents’ stuff is more than clutter” by Katie Roiphe, The Washington Post

“The Surprising Mental-Health Benefits of Bedazzling” by Angela Haupt, Time

After the graduation ceremony, I met my parents in the lobby of their Beverly Hills hotel, a swanky place, my father had called it. A few steps up from their usual Marriott or Holiday Inn because my mother had forgotten to make a reservation and everything with a more reasonable price tag was already booked. How the hell did ya forget? It’s been on the calendar for four years, for Chrissakes. My father’s voice echoed off the crystals dripping from the massive chandelier over our heads.

He ordered drinks and shrimp cocktail for him and my mother. Even though I’d been a vegetarian since the sixth grade, he double and triple checked I didn’t want one (Who doesn’t like shrimp cocktail?). I watched him finger the box of Tiparillos in his coat pocket while my mother passed over presents wrapped in the blue and gold of my university: A portfolio with spaces for a legal pad, business and credit cards, a pen with my alma mater’s name, and a crest in gold on the navy cover. A leather shoulder bag with my initials burned onto the outermost flap, so you can lug around all those legal briefs and whatnot at Georgetown next year, my father boomed, though we both knew this was his first time seeing it. A baby blue box with diamond studs that I’d lose within the year. Yet another gold cross, this one with a rose in the center, to remind you of what’s important, my mother whispered.

I brought you something, my father said as we waited for my mother to return from changing into something warmer (Los Angeles not warm enough for you? my father had asked her retreating back) before heading to dinner, another swanky place, this time in Malibu. I remember the shock of surprise at his words, the way it spread from my chest like melting butter on the English muffins my mother ate every morning, filling in all the holes and gaps.

From under his chair, he pulled a binder. He used the same two-inch maroon binders for everything: tax documents, house projects, medical information, legal documents, family papers, circuit board designs, work orders, client projects—each one in a separate binder, so that they ringed his office and bled into the back rooms, towering over us like bricks, each with a label written in his cramped letters.

He shook it at me when I hesitated, and I gripped it, taking it from him slowly, with two hands, as if it were something holy.

I thought you might want this, to see what’s what so you can keep it going—for your own records—now that I’m done.

The words made no sense until I opened the cover. And even then, I had to study the spreadsheet, pages long, at the front, then flip over the divider, behind which receipts had been taped onto paper and placed in plastic sheet protectors, stacks and stacks of them, filling the binder to bursting—the last ones, resting on top—bills of sale for the cross, the earrings, the shoulder bag, the portfolio.

It’s good to keep track of your expenses.

My father’s voice floated somewhere over my head. The melting butter in me turned cold, hard. It froze me in place, my eyes fixed on the numbers blurring before me. His hand landed on my shoulder, unfreezing me.

Okay, I breathed out. I looked up at him, but he was looking across the lobby.

There’s your mother, he said, stepping away from me. Do we have everything?

I slid the binder into the shoulder bag. My mother gathered the used napkins into a pile and handed me the extra sweater she’d brought down from the room. In case you get chilly, she’d said.

That’s everything then, my father said, looking toward the door. And with that, we walked to the valet, the heavy corner of the binder banging against my hip with each step. I still have it, carried from apartment to apartment, from my first condo to this house, where it sits, tucked in the back of my closet, the weight unchanged.

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KC Courtland makes her home in Northern California, where she earns a living as a substitute teacher and spends the rest of her time lost in stories—sometimes the ones she reads, sometimes the ones she writes. Away from the page, she can be found painting with more enthusiasm than skill, stretching into yoga poses of questionable grace, or curled up with her two cats and loving spouse.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“In Praise of Answered Prayers” by

“I will love this hallway” by ,

“Inside the Collection: Austin Quinlan” by , The Dry Down Diaries

“Declutter Your Car” by , The Declutter Queen

“The Secrets in My Mother’s Nightstand” by Sophia Glock,

“Too Many Books?” by Alex Vadukul, The New York Times

Deven and I sat side by side, our silence broken only by an occasional squeak as I nervously shifted in the swivel chair. A chilly spring rain tapped at the windows, running down the glass and distorting the view of the Hudson shore. Opposite us, Steve, the divorce mediator, peered down at an open folder on the massive resin-coated slab of walnut that served as his desk. You could serve a formal dinner for six around that thing, eight if you didn’t mind crowding your guests.

Steve ran his finger down the list in front of him, nodding and grunting a soft uh-huh at each item. When he got to the end, he raised his head and looked at me. “What about the jewelry?”

His question threw me. “Jewelry? What about what jewelry?”

“The jewelry,” Steve repeated. “It’s not on the list. Who gets the jewelry?”

Deven and I were there to discuss equitably splitting up the stuff we owned in common. I had tallied everything I could think of with material, sentimental, or practical value, inventorying furniture, books, pictures, dishes, even the contents of the liquor cabinet. I had some jewelry, of course, but I also owned jeans and dresses and a bathrobe. It never occurred to me that anything I wore would be subject to the division of property in our separation agreement.

Realization dawned. Steve wasn’t asking about my strings of glass beads or hammered copper earrings from a craft fair. He meant big-ticket items, an expensive watch or a hefty engagement ring. But the few pieces I had that qualified as serious jewelry clung to the bottom couple of rungs of that ladder. Plus they were things I had inherited—my mother’s wedding band, her mother’s modest engagement ring, a moonstone pendant that had belonged to my other grandmother—not gifts from Deven.

When we decided to get married, I didn’t ask for and wasn’t given anything to flash off my left hand. For wedding rings, we had picked wire-thin gold bands. Simple, subtle, nothing valuable enough to quibble over. Nothing to split because we each had one. Months earlier, I had ruefully stashed mine in the very back of my jewelry box.

For a quick moment, though, the mediator’s question struck a suspicious, even paranoid, nerve in me. I felt like Steve knew that a pirate’s chest overflowing with glittering swag lay waiting to be unearthed in the back yard, probably camouflaged by the compost pile. Had Deven had been holding out on me all these years, hiding gems and gold and other treasures that might have been, should have been, mine?

Wait.

Mud and gems and rain. Deven had once given me gems.

It was the first morning of our brief honeymoon, a drizzly day, chilly and gray for late May. Still, we set out on foot from the inn where we had spent the night, ready to explore the little Minnesota river town. We strolled up and down the streets, wandering into antiques shops, ducking into a cafe to warm ourselves with coffee. Back outside, we turned a corner and came across two men selling raw clumps of amethyst—my birthstone!—out of the back of a battered green pickup. They had hammered them out of a rock formation somewhere nearby, they told us. The amethyst-studded rocks, ranging in size from tangerine to football, were nestled on a pile of muddy tarps next to a produce scale; the men priced their wares by the pound.

Together, Deven and I picked out an angular hunk of rock. It was the dirty gray of the damp sidewalk under our feet, but veined with purple. Amethyst crystals jutted out, their facets sparkling like fireworks frozen in a July sky. My brand-new husband opened his wallet, peeled off some bills, and bought it for me. More paperweight than jewelry, the gift felt like a fairy-tale treasure mined by elves rather than by two enterprising men in grimy jeans. On that day and for years afterward, I prized this serendipitous find as an omen, an amulet, a promising portent for our freshly minted marriage.

“So the jewelry,” Steve prompted again. “What about the jewelry?”

“Nothing really to speak of,” I told him. “Nothing that needs to be included on the list.”

My honeymoon souvenir didn’t make the cut as marital property that needed to be divvied up. Nor did it pan out as a good-luck charm for a long and happy life together, but that’s a lot to ask of inert mineral, even when it’s bedazzled with purple crystals. Still, I continue to cherish my amethyst. I like seeing it on the bookshelf near my desk. I like cupping its cool heft in my hand. I like the reminder that once upon a time, two hopeful people loved each other enough to sign on for a lifetime together. Mostly, though, I like that it reminds me that pockets of magic lurk in the world, waiting to manifest even at the most unlikely of times. When you crack open an ordinary-looking chunk of rock, for example, or turn a random corner on a drizzly, gray, Minnesota day.

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Jill Rovitzky Black is an editor, writer, and inept but enthusiastic potter who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she struggles to keep weeds out of her garden and chaos out of her house. A lifelong wordsmith who most recently made her living by writing and editing medical education grants, scripts, and slide decks, she is currently working on a memoir about dealing with her husband’s behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, which remained undiagnosed until after his death.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“It started with a pair of baby shoes…” by , The Keepthings

“Living in The Objecthood.” by , The Great Perhaps

“3 Keepers & a Regret: Laurel Cummings” by , Retail Therapy on Substack

“Confessions of an Obsessive Collector” by , From Java with Love

“Why Am I Carrying Around 3,856 Photos of a Stranger?” by , Lovely Girl

I had the idea on the treadmill. I was visiting my parents during the Christmas holiday and found myself jogging in the “theatre tread” room to a huge screen presentation of the movie A Christmas Story at the local gym. It had been a minute since I’d seen the movie, but when I saw the leg lamp make its famous appearance, I stopped the treadmill, adjusted my own artificial limb, and texted my friend: “we’ve got to make lamps out of my legs.”

We decided we’d make super high-end bespoke and bedazzled leg lamps. We’d get a welder. We’d attach old rusty yard art to the top, maybe animal antlers. We’d use the top of the outgrown running leg (one of which I was wearing while I had this idea), to hang a chandelier that we’d find at a thrift store. We’d wire them up and sell them on Etsy. We agreed this was our million-dollar idea: Leg Up Lamps.

I’ve been wearing a series of prosthetic limbs since I was four years old. The earliest legs were made of literal wood and metal hinges that needed to be oiled in the winter to reduce stickiness; the one I wore at six years old has a ketchup stain that wouldn’t come out, remnants of my grand idea to cover the leg in Heinz 57 “blood” and toss it through the basement window in order to terrify trick-or-treaters, which was hugely successful.

In the 90s I upgraded to my first hydraulic prosthesis, but like any equipment, artificial or otherwise, parts wear out. Each artificial leg in this country of criminal health care was ridiculously expensive, even after insurance “graciously” (as one insurance representative described it) paid for 20 percent of the $10-90,000 price tag. The question remained: What to do with these pesky legs? Do you throw out something that cost more than your car? I’ve therefore been hauling around a box of my own body parts for almost two decades.

If objects carry stories, which they absolutely do, then these legs are a doozy. I traveled all over the world in one, carried two children in another, lost a child wearing another, was married in a few of them, started running in one of them until it literally broke. The smallest legs look sad and stained and from another era—say, late 1880s mining town.

Having a piece of the body that is made by someone else (for me, always a man) is a strange experience—think the opposite of being fitted for a fancy and fabulous dress. For a while, these objects belonged to me, they were literally part of me, but I understood it was time to do something playful and artistic with them.

Rob—my friend of 20 plus years now—and I are serious about making these lamps, and the idea makes me a bit giddy. To take an object that was necessary for my body to go anywhere or to do anything, but was also seen as a flaw or a weakness or a source of shame and make it a source of LIGHT? Yes. It’s so much more interesting than hiding it away in a box.

I’ve always believed that whatever we make or create goes out into the world to have its own life. Although those legs were not my original pieces of artwork (they were made by Bill, Bob, and another Bill, my prosthetists throughout the decades, all of whom are now retired), I wore them into the world, I gave them life and travel and adventure and activity, and now they’ll move into the world in a far different—and fun—way

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Emily Rapp Black is the bestselling author of five books, most recently I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling. She is Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The day I jumped into the pit in the London Tube to retrieve my son’s lost juggling ball” by , At Home in the World

“Toy Story” by , Shaved Meats, Piled High

“Have I Got Too Much Stuff?” by

“The Philosophy of Everyday Objects” by , The Memoirist

“Gen Z and Millennial Collectors Turn Vintage IKEA Into Investment Pieces” by Leonora Epstein, The Wall Street Journal

“Oh my gosh—that dress…” I said to my best friend Robert when I spotted it hanging in a Kathmandu shop as we were walking back to our guesthouse after dinner. “I need to hold it.”

The tiny green dress, hanging among sarongs, woollen jackets, and bedspreads, looked like it might fit a 1- or 2-year-old. It was made of green silk, stitched with tiny mirrors and threaded with red and orange embroidery.

The shopkeeper sighed when I asked him to take it down. He was closing up, already half gone for the night. I watched him hook it from the window and place it in my hands. Up close, the dress was heavier than it looked. I pressed it against my chest. The shopkeeper explained that it was from Rajasthan, and that the mirrors were meant to ward off evil spirits.

I was in my early twenties, working as a hostess in Japan and spending the money on travel. My life plans extended only as far as the next rave, the next full moon party. I couldn’t imagine a future that included any kind of permanence or settling down—never mind becoming a mother. And yet, something about this dress stirred a feeling I’d never experienced before.

“I think I’ve just had a vision,” I whispered to Robert. “I’m going to have a little girl with shiny black hair. And this is her dress.”

I felt foolish saying it, the certainty so out of character. I tried to laugh it off and hand the dress back to the shopkeeper, but I couldn’t. Buying that dress wasn’t a choice.

Robert must have thought I was having a momentary lapse, or that the party drugs were talking. It must have made him sad.

Robert was in love with me. I’d known for years. I’d told him I wasn’t attracted to him that way. We’d road-tripped to the Grand Canyon, gone to countless concerts, and now we were in Nepal to hike the Himalayas. He knew my stories. My messes. My exes. I trusted him completely, even as I refused the future he quietly imagined.

He didn’t try to talk me into or out of buying the dress that night. He knew it wasn’t about the money, or the lack of space in my already full backpack.

Two years later, I gave birth to a baby girl with thick black hair. My marriage to her Japanese father was unexpected and unconventional. The baby—my surprise.

As soon as she could walk, I had the sleeves taken up by a neighborhood tailor and dressed her in it. She loved touching the mirrors, fiddling with the hem. One fall afternoon, back in Canada while visiting my parents, my father and I took her to Stanley Park and tried to photograph her in the dress. She wouldn’t sit still. She ran toward the water, the mirrors flashing as she moved, her laughter carried by the wind.

When my little girl turned six, my marriage ended. We left Japan and were staying with my parents. Robert helped me unload my shipping container of belongings, gave me a computer, and lent me his car.

A few months later, I woke one morning wishing Robert was lying beside me.

That little girl is 28 now. I still wake up beside Robert each morning. The first thing I see when I open my eyes is the dress, hanging from an elephant hook above the green dresser at the foot of our bed.

“Remember the night you bought that?” Robert asked yesterday. “We were so young.”

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Dhana Musil is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Grain, The Ex-Puritan, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She writes personal essays and narrative nonfiction that explore memory, place, and interesting subcultures. She lives in British Columbia.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“My Collection of Etch a Sketch feat. Princess Etch” by , My Collection Of

“The Safety of Objects” by , The Hopeless Millennial

“THE DEATH-PUDDING CONTAINER” by , The Keepthings

“You’ve Been Shopping for a Woman Who Isn’t Coming” by , A Home That Shuts Up

“‘Toy Story’ Convinced Me My Toys Had Feelings—and I’m Still Dealing With It” by Juliana LaBianca, Good Housekeeping

“The Power of Friendship Bracelets” by Natalie Katona, To All The Men I’ve Tolerated Before

“The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America’s Garage Sales” by Caity Weaver, The Atlantic