#it's 4am and i'm Reflecting™

[vertoludum]

i like old things. whenever i'm gifted with or buy something new, there's a period of getting acquainted with it, of wearing it down until it's familiar and safe. new objects are strangers, and i need to know them before i'm truly comfortable around them. i still have the first toy i ever got, and my family constantly asks me why i keep wearing the same decades old backpack.

my grandma got me a new pair of converses, and i appreciate the gesture and having shoes that i could wear to places where my worn down ones would be inappropriate (if i ever need to be somewhere like that). but they're not comforting, nor soft, they haven't been around my feet for years yet, so they're never my first choice.

one of my keychains is a little guitar i got as a birthday gift from a classmate in seventh grade. whenever i realize i still have it, 8 years later, i wonder if that would be surprising to them or not. we haven't talked since we finished middle school, and i admit i didn't keep it because of the connection to them. i just kept it, and now it's a friend. there was never any reason for me to get rid of it, and i just keep adding new keychains to the bunch whenever i end up getting one.

i do realize that this relates to being a mild hoarder, but, since i very rarely buy anything new, it's not that big of a problem. after all, i just keep the same things i've had forever and don't get any more, instead of replacing them. which is why i feel entitled to the sadness that came when my father told me he threw away my old toys at his house. it'd have been better if he had donated them, though it'd still hurt a little, but he just threw them away. i remember a lot of them, and maybe it's just due to having been a lonely child, but they were truly my first and only friends for a long time. there was a wooden horse named phillip (after belle's horse in beauty and the beast), and a yellow marionette of an ostrich, and a doll that used to be almost as big as me, with plastic limbs and head, a rag torso and curly, short, almost neon red hair, called bibi. i don't think about it that often, but it's a bit saddening when i do.

and now, more than ever, i'm surrounded only by those old, familiar things. before, there used to be some contact with people at university or on the subway, or with my flatmate's furniture. now i live alone, and there's just me and my things, all the time. and it's fine. i know all of them and all of them know me. sure, there's the stuff i had to buy when i moved, but they're coming along nicely.

part of me wishes there wasn't the temporary discomfort of new objects before we got acquainted, but in truth i don't know if my old ones would bring me so much mutual understanding and familiarity if it was so. and it isn't really that bad. they always get old enough.