A Box Full of Things I Can’t Replace

Photo by Kieron Mannix on Unsplash

I have one bin that has followed me through every move I’ve ever made. Since I was born I’ve moved around 15 times in my life, so a lot of things have come and gone, and I’m not someone who keeps everything. I purge what I don’t need. Sometimes more than I should, sometimes not enough. But that bin has never been part of the question. If something happened and I had to grab one thing, that would be it without hesitation.

Inside of it is a mix of things that, to anyone else, probably look completely meaningless. My baby blanket, the one I’ve had since I was little. My cabbage patch kid Quincy. Old high school art books. A stack of printed photos from my first apartment where my roommate and I had our living room wall to wall in pictures. If you came over, you took a photo and it got added. It was kind of a tradition. We were also the party house at the time, so there were a lot of them. I don’t have all of the photos anymore, but I kept a good amount. I have some of my artwork in there too, and a bunch of random trinkets I’ve picked up over the years or that people have given me.

There are also things in there tied to people I’ve lost. Stuff from that same roommate, stuff from my first love, and other small things from people who have passed. Nothing big or obviously important. Just random objects that, if you didn’t know the story behind them, wouldn’t mean anything at all.

And honestly, that would be a fair question.

Some of the things in there don’t make sense to keep. They don’t serve a purpose. They’re not valuable. They don’t get used. They sit in a bin, usually tucked away somewhere out of sight, right now in my attic. I don’t display them and I don’t go through them often. Most of it just exists. But when I do open it, every single item in there is tied to a person, or a time, or a version of my life that doesn’t exist anymore. And that’s the part that matters.

I’ve lost people throughout my life who meant a lot to me. Friends, relationships, people who were once a constant and then suddenly weren’t. Some of the things in that bin are the only physical connection I still have to them. A photo, a random object, something small that would mean nothing to anyone else but holds an entire memory for me. And the truth is, I don’t have the best memory. Between growing up the way I did and dealing with long periods of anxiety and depression, there are gaps. There are things I know happened but can’t fully recall. So I hold onto these objects not because I think they bring anything back, but because they help me not lose it completely.

I know people say we assign too much meaning to objects, and I don’t disagree. Logically, I understand that a photo or a random trinket cannot hold a person or a moment in place. It doesn’t bring anything back. But there’s also something about having something tangible to connect to that a memory alone doesn’t always give you. It’s like a reference point.

Something your brain can grab onto and build from. Without it, things feel a lot easier to lose over time. And maybe that’s just how I function, but I’ve accepted that about myself.

What’s interesting is that I don’t treat these things like decorations or even like active parts of my life. I don’t unpack them when I move. I don’t leave them out. They stay protected, put away, almost separate from everything else. Part of that is practical, I don’t want them damaged. But part of it is also that they feel private. Like they’re not really meant to be seen or gone through casually. They’re not there to be explained.

At the end of the day, they survived because I made sure they did. Every move, every purge, every time I had to decide what mattered and what didn’t, that bin was never a question. Not because the items themselves are important in any traditional sense, but because of what they hold for me. They’re pieces of time that I can’t go back to, reminders of people I can’t talk to anymore, and proof that those moments existed even if they feel far away now.

I think if I lost all of it, I wouldn’t just be losing objects. I’d be losing access to parts of my own life in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. And maybe that sounds like assigning too much weight to things that don’t deserve it, but at the same time, I think some things are worth holding onto, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.

Not everything needs to be useful. Some things just need to stay.