Name. Place. Animal. Thing.

Drawers

are strange places.

Things go there

when they are not ready

to disappear.

Not because

they are valuable.

But because 

sometimes,

throwing something away

requires admitting

you were wrong

about why you kept it.

Twelve watches.

I keep buying them

as if one of them

will eventually confess

where all the time went.

They all work.

Every single one.

Which somehow

makes it worse.

A broken watch

would have been merciful.

It would admit

that something ended.

These keep ticking,

quietly proving

that time does not stop

just because

someone inside it

has already expired.

A sketch pad.

Pages of faces.

I have always trusted

black and white

more than reality.

Colours are dishonest.

They know how to seduce.

They paint over wounds.

They make corpses look alive

from a distance.

But monochrome

does not negotiate.

Every wrinkle

becomes history.

Every shadow

becomes confession.

Every face

becomes an autopsy

of everything

it survived.

Some finished.

Some abandoned.

Some staring back at me

like people I knew

before they were dissected

and served as memories.

Perhaps that is why

I keep drawing faces.

Not because

I want to remember

how people look.

But because

I want to know

what remains

after everything

they spent their lives

pretending to be

is removed.

Three sticks

of charcoal.

The only things I own

that understand

how darkness

can be dragged

across a surface

and somehow become

something worth looking at.

Perhaps that is why

I never trusted light

as much as transformation.

Light reveals.

Darkness creates.

And sometimes,

darkness creates

better things

than the people

who escaped it.

A stack of origamis.

Animals.

Or whatever remained

after my hands

failed to remember

what animals

were supposed to become.

Although my brain

remembered

every fragile detail.

A bird

with wings folded wrong.

A wolf

that looks more afraid

than dangerous.

A horse

whose legs

forgot the purpose

of running.

I never corrected them.

There is something honest

about creatures

that carry

the fingerprints

of their maker's failures.

Perfect things

only prove

someone followed instructions.

Broken things

reveal

who was holding

the paper.

Pens.

Too many.

Some expensive.

Some stolen.

Some collected

from places

I no longer remember.

All waiting

for a sentence

important enough

to deserve them.

A fountain pen.

Reserved

for words

that need to pretend

they are permanent.

Funny,

how humans invented

permanent ink

while spending their entire lives

trying to erase themselves.

A passport.

Full of stamps.

Evidence

that I crossed borders.

None

that I arrived.

I carry proof

of everywhere

I escaped from.

Apparently,

the world is large enough

to run across continents

but small enough

to always find yourself

waiting at the destination.

And somewhere beneath everything,

a crooked nail.

I don't know

what it belonged to.

But I keep it.

Because perhaps

everything deserves

one last chance

to become useful.

Even broken things.

Especially broken things.

Especially the ones

that no longer remember

what they were supposed

to hold together.

The drawer

is full of them.

Objects.

Ideas.

Dreams.

Failed experiments

with human skin.

Versions of myself

I started building

and abandoned

halfway through.

Every night,

I open it.

Not because

I need anything.

Not because

I expect something inside

to return.

But because

I need evidence

that I once believed

there was something

worth constructing.

The watches

are still ticking.

The pages

are still waiting.

The charcoal

still understands darkness.

The animals

still pretend

they were meant

to be alive.

The pens

still believe

there is something

left to write.

I envy them.

The objects.

At least they get

to remain unfinished.

Humans are crueler.

We call unfinished things

failures

and unfinished people

potential.

Then I close it.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Like shutting

the lid

of a coffin

that remembers

the shape

of its resident.

Because some things

do not need

to be thrown away.

They only need

to be kept long enough

for us to forget

why we kept them.

The drawer

is not a place

where unfinished things wait

to become whole.

It is where

failed versions of ourselves

go

to die quietly.

And perhaps

that is the cruelest truth

about broken things.

They do not always need fixing.

Sometimes,

they only need

a dark enough place

where nobody asks

what they were supposed

to become.

Every night,

I open the drawer.

Not because

I am searching

for something.

But because

for a few seconds,

the watches still tick,

the faces still breathe,

the distorted animals

still remember flight,

and the broken pieces

still have the audacity

to pretend

they belong somewhere.

Then I close it.

Slowly.

Because even abandoned things

deserve privacy

when they are dying.

And tomorrow,

I will open it again.

Not because I miss them.

Not because I love them.

But because I need to know

whether the drawer

is still full

of things I abandoned

or whether,

somewhere between

the watches,

the charcoal,

the broken animals,

and the unfinished faces,

I finally found

the only thing

I was ever trying

to throw away.

Myself.

Unfortunately,

I was the only thing

I abandoned

without ever putting down.