The warmth of objects

For anyone who has ever called more than one place home, for anyone who has awaken in their lifetime under more than one roof, it’s not unusual to be hyperaware of the ways we attach ourselves to objects or they attach to ourselves, how much they hold onto our memory lane or fail to do so.

It’s quite often that we throw away objects because they are too raw in their testimony of painful occurrences. We rather forget, not have the tangible proofs of our own difficult times. Somehow, it’s more intriguing when we encounter objects we fail to recognize ourselves in. Their shallow and blank surface fail to evoke any sort of connection to our corporeal existence, as intruders, it’s more likely they’re thrown away, ending up in a dump, or if, luckily, being rescued to be given a second chance in another person’s home.

It may be the sentiment of youth I fear to lose, that despise every year I step more into adulthood, I somehow fail to abandon this habit of mine, to decor the walls of my room as some kind of contemporary version of horror vacui. Pages torn apart from magazines, museum booklets and cinema pamphlets, visiting cards, posters, maps, travel tickets, calendar illustrations, as if in the case the walls were kept blank as I first arrived, it’d be an indication that I’m just a visitor, detached. To mark my space is to make of the temporary, of the transitory, till the end whether is marked by the next move or by death, a physical, tangible space, a bubble that I can reclaim as my own, to mark my objects as an extension of my body, remembrances that I can touch and smell.