#19 Blue Steel Flask
I remember walking to school with a water bottle which had a long cord that looped through the top of the cap. My mom would make sure to hang it around my neck because she knew I'd lose it otherwise. I always lost things. The most heartbreaking thing for my mom was that I kept losing nice umbrellas. Umbrellas were expensive in a part of the world where it rained 6 months a year. There was one in particular that she talked about for months - this umbrella with white and blue stripes that my aunt had brought from America. The biggest heartbreak for me was when I lost a pack of 51 cricket cards that I had been collecting for over a year. My mom kept telling me that I'd lose them if I take the pack to school, so I never did except this one day when I really wanted to show my friends thw collection I was proud of. I didn't even have any recollection of where I might have lost them.
So both my mom and I were both really anxious about me losing things, which didnt really help the case. Somewhere along the way I realized that if I developed a relationship with the things I owned there was less chance of me losing them, so I started talking to some of the favorite objects such as my first Macbook, a 2015 silver Macbook air. Sometimes these relationships would be simpler, such as putting stickers on all the water bottles that I owned. I stopped losing them as often.
There's this navy blue steel flask that I got from Target, which has stickers of my favorite podcast Philosophize This, another from an Austin local bar Floppy Disk Repair Co. I had reached optimal sticker to negative space ratio with the last sticker - it said Austin in all caps. I got the blue steel flask in June of 2021. I took it with me everywhere. It was with me when I visited my parents for Thanksgiving this year and got in a big argument them. The visit brought up a lot of things that I thought I had dealt with and tucked away nicely in a closet deep enough. I spent the night before Thanksgiving in a hotel, after leaving my parents place the most distraught I had been in a while. The next day when I left I checked that I had taken everything I owned from the room. Instead of checking for a list of things I just made sure the room was empty. I forgot the blue steel flask in the bathroom that I did not think about checking. So I guess I still lose things after all. Some relationships are harder than others.