Last month, while working on my laptop, I absentmindedly reached over, knocked over the cup at my side, and spilled its liquid contents all over the allegedly important bits of a computer. The screen immediately cut to black.
As I trudged to the store with my tail between my legs that same afternoon to have it pronounced dead and to buy its replacement, I… wasn’t ready to let go. It all happened too fast. How could it be so easy to bring such a powerful piece of hardware to its knees? Like in the case of an actual death, the kind-hearted employee left me with the bricked computer in my arms and said, “Take as much time as you need. You can recycle it whenever you’re ready.”
It wasn’t until Easter Sunday, weeks later, after hoping for a resurrection-level miracle that never came, I finally felt ready to part with it. I closed the lid and slowly peeled off the big holographic sticker of my first dog I’d placed over the logo years ago. It was in that moment that I felt a sudden wave of emotion hit and understood what it was that made this laptop initially hard to hand over.
The computer was given to me by my old job right around the beginning of 2020. I placed the sticker on it shortly after to really make it feel like “mine,” and mixed together, it felt like a relic of those past few years, a strange ship of 2020-2023 in a bottle. And while circumstances changed, losses were counted, life moved on in that span of time, being on this computer was just a very unassuming part of my daily life. To finally see its lights go out with no fanfare whatsoever felt symbolic of the ending of that chapter in my life, a transition I’d been grappling with for a while now.
I’ve been a sucker for this idea of a spirit within objects since I watched the first Toy Story movie as an impressionable youth. And while I think it’s natural for our possessions to cycle in and out of our lives—no matter how well-loved or barely used they are—in the end, I often find myself feeling a twinge of sadness when it comes time to part with them.
I recently read Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary, an eclectic curation that embodies the concept that there may be objects so “normal” around us at all times that we don’t think twice about them. But the ease of their use, the value they add, the atmosphere they create, or the emotions they evoke are what enrich our daily lives and make them “super.” In another pop-modern application, Marie Kondo’s KonMari method includes steps like folding socks to give them breathing room and expressing gratitude to each item before discarding it. It’s beautiful to think our belongings that do the most thankless jobs and actually make our worlds go ‘round could be the ones that deserve the most thanks and consideration.
There are always things we carry with us that are imbued with sentimentality—family heirlooms, baby’s firsts, travel souvenirs, yearbooks and cards and letters and photos—and then there are objects that go under the radar for the entire duration of their time with us that suddenly, inexplicably, convey something that we never knew they possessed.
As I finish this post, I’m starting to think about the unassuming and, sometimes, unpretty things I’m fortunate to have—the utensils in the drawer, the muddy sneakers I’ve put miles and miles and miles in, the pens I use to jot down notes to myself—feeling really grateful and wondering what sleeping surprises I’ll discover next.
(This is all I’ll say for now because I’ve been sitting on a draft about everyday objects for months. But with the untimely loss of my computer, I was reminded again of the things we bring into our lives—whether for necessity or pleasure, what they say about us, and how they capture who we are in a moment in time. More on this soon!)