I Wasn't Going to Make This Complicated

There are certain promises I continue to make to myself despite overwhelming evidence that they simply aren't true.

One of my favorites is, "This will only take a few minutes."

It's an optimistic little sentence, isn't it? It arrives with all the confidence of someone who has apparently learned nothing from every other time they've said it. I tell myself I'm only going to do one small thing before getting on with the rest of my day. Find the tape. Straighten one drawer. Throw away the obvious junk. Close the drawer. Carry on with life.

I've never understood why I keep believing that version of events.

Not long ago, I needed a roll of tape.

I knew exactly where it was.

Or at least I thought I did.

Like so many of us, I have one drawer that seems to have accepted responsibility for every object in the house that doesn't have a more convincing place to live. Batteries. Rubber bands. Old keys. Takeout menus from restaurants that probably don't exist anymore. Instruction manuals that have survived several appliances. The random assortment of things that somehow graduate from "I'll deal with this later" to permanent residency without any of us noticing.

Naturally, that's where the tape would be.

I opened the drawer completely convinced I would reach in, grab what I needed, and be on my way in less than ten minutes.

Instead, somewhere along the way, I found myself pulling a chair over and settling in beside the open drawer. Looking back, that was probably the first clue that this had stopped being a search for tape.

The tape had disappeared into a landscape of forgotten objects, each one apparently eager to remind me that it existed. There was a birthday card from years ago that I had completely forgotten I'd saved. A receipt that made perfect sense to keep at the time and absolutely none now. A key that almost certainly belongs to something I no longer own, yet still feels far too important to throw away. I picked up one thing after another, and every object seemed to arrive carrying a story I hadn't expected to remember.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I started laughing.

Not because the drawer was particularly messy. I've made peace with the fact that drawers like this are simply part of being human.

I laughed because I had done it again.

I had gone looking for tape and somehow ended up wandering through another season of my life.

That's a remarkable trick ordinary objects know how to perform. Most of the time they ask nothing of us. They sit quietly in the background of our days until, for reasons we never see coming, one of them gently taps us on the shoulder and says, "Do you remember?"

The funny thing about a drawer like that is that it has absolutely no respect for your original plan. You open it looking for tape, and before long you're negotiating with a collection of objects that seem remarkably confident they deserve to stay. Every one of them appears to have an argument ready. The key insists I still need it, even though I haven't the faintest idea what it opens. The instruction manual is somehow convinced I'll regret letting it go despite the fact that I've owned several coffee makers since the one it belongs to. Even the rubber bands carry themselves with quiet confidence, apparently certain that their moment is still coming.

A button from a shirt I haven't owned in years suddenly feels far too important to throw away. A restaurant menu survives another kitchen cleanout because maybe we'll go back there someday, even if the restaurant quietly disappeared years ago. A handful of spare screws sits patiently in the corner because surely they must belong to something important, although I've never once been able to identify what that something might be. I don't question any of it while I'm sitting there. It all seems perfectly reasonable until I imagine trying to explain those decisions to someone else.

I can picture the conversation.

"This key?"

"No idea what it opens."

"So why are you keeping it?"

"Because the second I throw it away, I'll discover it belonged to something incredibly important."

It's completely irrational.

It's also completely believable.

Then I picked up the birthday card.

At some point, without ever making a conscious decision, I had stopped sorting through objects and started sorting through stories. The things that slipped easily into the recycling pile all had one thing in common. They had never become part of my life in any meaningful way. Expired coupons. Dead batteries. Appliance warranties that had quietly expired years before. They were useful once, and then they weren't.

The birthday card was different.

Not because it still had a purpose, but because it carried one. It wasn't difficult to throw away because it was made of paper. It was difficult because, somewhere without my noticing, it had become connected to a person, a season of my life, and a version of myself I hadn't visited in years. The card had quietly stopped being an object. It had become a doorway.

I sat there for another few minutes with the drawer still open beside me and realized I still hadn't found the tape. By then, I wasn't entirely sure it was what I had been looking for in the first place.

As I sat there with the birthday card in one hand and absolutely no tape in sight, another question quietly worked its way into my head. It wasn't why I had kept a birthday card. That part made perfect sense. What I couldn't quite figure out was why I had kept this particular one.

Over the course of a lifetime, I've received hundreds of cards. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, thank-you notes, postcards from vacations, little handwritten messages tucked inside gifts, programs from concerts and recitals, and all the other pieces of paper that accumulate around a life before quietly disappearing from it. Most of them are long gone. I couldn't tell you when I let them go, where they went, or why this particular card somehow managed to survive while so many others didn't.

I turned it over in my hands, looking for some clue that might explain its longevity. Maybe there was something about the occasion. Maybe it was the handwriting. Maybe I'd deliberately tucked it into the drawer all those years ago because I knew I'd want to find it again someday. That last possibility gives Past Me considerably more organizational credit than she probably deserves, especially considering the card was currently sharing real estate with an unidentified key and enough rubber bands to suggest I had once been preparing for a shortage.

More likely, I'd put it there because I didn't know what else to do with it.

That's how things end up in drawers like this in the first place. We don't necessarily decide to keep them forever. We decide not to decide right now. We tuck something away because we're busy, or because throwing it out feels wrong, or because we're certain we'll deal with it later. Then later becomes next month, next year, and eventually some completely unsuspecting afternoon when we pull up a chair looking for tape.

The card had survived all of that.

I found myself wondering how many times I must have opened that drawer over the years without really seeing it. I had probably moved the card aside to reach something underneath it. Maybe I'd picked it up during another cleaning attempt, considered throwing it away, and put it back without giving the decision another thought. It had been there all along, quietly occupying a few inches of space while the life connected to it moved farther and farther into the past.

That was the part I couldn't stop thinking about.

We tend to imagine memory as though we're carefully building an archive of our lives, saving the important things and letting the rest fall away. Sitting beside that drawer, I wasn't so sure. If that were true, I would have done a much better job of preserving the moments I was certain I'd never forget. Instead, some of those have faded around the edges while completely ordinary things remain astonishingly clear. A laugh. The way someone said my name. The smell of a particular kitchen. A song playing somewhere in the background. Details that had no reason to announce themselves as important somehow found a way to stay.

Maybe the objects work the same way.

That birthday card hadn't necessarily survived because it represented one of the most important days of my life. It may have survived because, years ago, I placed it in a drawer and never quite found a reason to remove it. Yet somewhere during all that accidental keeping, it had become connected to something larger than itself. I could hold a piece of paper in my hand and suddenly find myself remembering a person, a place, a conversation, and a version of myself I hadn't thought about in years.

I looked back into the drawer, which by now had produced nearly everything except the one thing I'd opened it to find, and smiled. Apparently I'd done a surprisingly good job preserving pieces of my life without having the slightest idea that's what I was doing.

All because I couldn't decide what to throw away.

Eventually, I found the tape.

It was underneath a stack of takeout menus, beside two batteries of questionable reliability and a small plastic piece that I'm fairly certain belongs to something important. I have no evidence to support that last claim, but after everything we'd been through together, throwing it away seemed unnecessarily reckless.

By then, the chair had been pulled up to the drawer for so long that finding the tape felt almost beside the point. I had created three piles on the counter, although calling them a system would be generous. There was the obvious trash pile, the things that definitely belonged somewhere else, and a third category best described as "I have no idea what to do with this, so apparently it lives here."

The birthday card was sitting by itself.

I picked it up again before putting everything away, and for a moment I thought about what I was supposed to do with it. If the purpose of cleaning out a drawer is to make room, then keeping an old card doesn't make much sense. It can't open anything. It can't repair anything. It won't hold two pieces of paper together. It has no practical reason to occupy even a fraction of the space that the rubber bands are apparently preparing to defend for eternity.

Still, back into the drawer it went.

I didn't feel particularly sentimental about the decision. There was no dramatic pause, no sudden swell of imaginary music while I contemplated the passage of time. I just knew I wasn't finished with it yet, whatever that meant.

Maybe I've spent too much of my life assuming everything needs to justify the space it occupies.

We're very good at asking what things are for. We organize. We sort. We decide what is useful and what isn't, what belongs and what should go. There is something satisfying about all of that, especially when the drawer finally closes without requiring the strategic placement of one hand against the contents while the other pushes with determination.

But sitting there with that birthday card, I realized usefulness can be a remarkably small way of measuring value.

Some things earn their place because they make our lives easier. Some earn it because they're beautiful. Some remind us where we've been, who we loved, what made us laugh, or who we were before we became whoever we are now. And apparently some remain because we're still absolutely convinced that unidentified key is going to become critically important someday.

I can live with that.

When I finally stood up, the drawer looked better than it had when I started. Not dramatically better, but enough that I could claim victory without anyone conducting an independent inspection. The dead batteries were gone. The expired coupons had been recycled. The instruction manual had finally been released from its responsibilities. The mysterious key remained, because I'm not reckless.

So did the birthday card.

I put the tape where I was absolutely certain I'd remember it, pushed the drawer closed, and carried on with the rest of my day.

A few hours later, I needed the tape again.

I couldn't remember where I'd put it.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.