Treasure Chest

Those that know me well, know that I'm a very sentimental person. I keep wrappers, hand-written notes, ticket stubs and receipts from things like the snacks I bought from a petrol station on the way out of Cape Town at 4AM while witnessing a drunk girl scream at the staff that her boyfriend was, in fact, not her boyfriend.

Let me get to the reason that I do this. 

When I was like 8 or 9 (maybe older) I would wonder why I couldn't remember everything on a day to day basis. For instance, being able to recall any exact moment from the previous week. Not general happenings, but very specific things. Say I would be brushing my hair and think, “OK, next week at this time I am going to remember this exact moment,” and then I would try and clear my mind and stroke my hair with my brush and try to burn that moment into my mind so I would be able to recall it. 

And of course, because this is a ridiculous notion, I wouldn't remember to remember what I said I would and the next week would go by and I’d get all cross with myself the next time I had one of these existential moments and I'd swear to myself I would remember whatever it was this time. What was most frustrating to me was that I could remember seemingly 'bigger' things such as the taste in my mouth when I hit my head on my desk retrieving my rogue pencil. 

As you are now probably well aware, I am slightly obsessed with capturing moments. Moments, whether huge and important or small and comfortably significant, only live for as long as those moments last and then they become memories, destined to exist only in our minds. Memories are extremely fragile little things that are susceptible to the taint of time and can become warped or, worse yet, forgotten when our minds grow dark. I like to make sure that this won't happen to me.

So my wallet is jam packed with random things and bits of paper that each keep a particular memory alive in my mind every time I look at them. I have items of jewellery that serve the same purpose, as well as books, pens, letters, key rings, shoes and even a pair of plastic googly eyes. I don't hoard things by any means, in fact I function in quite the opposite way, but when it comes time to spring clean or clear out old stuff I no longer use or wear, there are things that have survived many a chuck. These are the the little things that help me remember what matters to me: the precious moments.